Reference Code: TA001887BPM

Publication Date: March 2010

Author: Chandranshu Singh

TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

Cuecent BPM Suite v5.0

Bahwan CyberTek

OVUM BUTLER GROUP VIEW

ABSTRACT

Bahwan CyberTek’s Cuecent BPM is a full-featured BPM platform suitable for high-availability, high-
performance scenarios. It comprises several modules: Cuecent BPMN modeler, Cuecent ESB, Cuecent e-
Business Process Automation and Collaboration (ebPAC), Cuecent Business Activity Monitoring (BAM),
Cuecent Forms Designer, and Cuecent BRE. The ebPAC module is an XPDL-compliant workflow engine for
orchestrating and executing process instances, and there is high-availability functionality built into the
platform for mission-critical business applications. It supports process modeling for BPMN version 1.1, with
support for BPMN 2.0 on the product roadmap. Cuecent ESB is embedded into the ebPAC, and is also
available as a stand-alone product for application integration. BCT’s offering is multi-faceted, but Ovum
believes it would benefit from the addition of native or third-party integrated process analytics, and enterprise
goal-management capabilities.

KEY FINDINGS

Full-featured BPM solution with an Lightweight distributed architecture supports

embedded ESB module. dynamic changes to processes.
Offers a content-management interface Supports multiple message formats,
with support for all content types including communication methods, and transport
scanned documents. protocols.
Pre-configured solution frameworks are Suitable for high-availability, high-
available out of the box for rapid performance scenarios.
deployment.
Supported on Windows, Linux, Solaris, Lacks process-analytics and goal-
AIX, and HP/UX platforms. management features.

LOOK AHEAD

Cuecent BPMN roadmap includes support for BPMN v2.0, a full-featured rules engine among other features.

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FUNCTIONALITY

Business-process management (BPM) products take a high-level view of an organization’s application

landscape and offer flexibility and control by modeling, automating, measuring, and optimizing business
processes. The promise of BPM is that businesses will become paperless, processes will become efficient,
and organizations will be able to respond more quickly to market demands. However, many business
processes are based on legacy applications, which might involve custom code, as well as various packaged
applications. For BPM to deliver on its promise of business agility there needs to be an integration layer that
can bring together disparate applications running on different platforms. Most BPM products depend on third-
party integration brokers, adapters, and enterprise service buses (ESBs) for this task. For an organization to
be responsive to change, the business-logic layer needs be decoupled from the executable process model.
This can be made possible through a robust configurable business-rules framework coupled with a complex
event processing (CEP) system. In Ovum’s view, no single approach to BPM provides the complete solution,
so we do not make the distinction between document-centric, integration-centric, and human-centric BPM
solutions. In our opinion, central to BPM is the business process, comprising people, content, and systems.
The Cuecent BPM suite, now in version 5.0, is a mix of top-down BPM and SOA, based on the view that the
application-development landscape is converging around BPM, integration technologies, and IDEs.

Product Analysis

Bahwan CyberTek is headquartered in Chennai, India with offices in the US and the Middle East. The
company’s Cuecent product-engineering division is also based in Chennai. BCT’s experience as an IT
services provider and systems integrator offering bespoke custom application-development projects led it to
look at BPM. The initial vision was to develop a product that would enable it to cut software-development
time, and the platform it developed is now at the core of everything the company does (all its other software
products have been built on top of the BPM platform). The platform evolved from the company’s process-
automation and application-integration background so it looks at BPM from multiple viewpoints such as
document and content management.

Cuecent BPM offering comprises the following modules: Cuecent BPMN modeler, Cuecent ESB, Cuecent e-
Business Process Automation and Collaboration (ebPAC), Cuecent Business Activity Monitoring (BAM),
Cuecent Forms Designer, and Cuecent BRE.

The Cuecent process modeler is available for free download from the company’s website. Cuecent supports
process modeling in BPMN version 1.1, with support for BPMN 2.0 on the product roadmap. Cuecent ESB
v2.0 is embedded into the ebPAC engine, and is also available as a stand-alone product for application
integration. The ebPAC is the workflow engine for orchestrating and executing process instances. The high-
availability functionality built into the ebPAC module will enable organizations to use Cuecent BPM for
mission-critical business applications. Ovum is also impressed with the multi-language support available in
the Forms Designer, which has web and desktop user interfaces aimed at business users. It also enables the
creation and deployment of web forms without any knowledge of web-scripting languages.

In addition to the process-monitoring and SLA-management capabilities embedded in the BAM module, there
are solution-administration, security, user-management, case-management, ad hoc process flow, process-
simulation, reporting, dashboards, and basic analytics features. Another key aspect is its Web 2.0-style
interface and an embedded contact list with instant-messaging capabilities.

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In Ovum’s view, Cuecent’s BAM module offers a comprehensive management layer encompassing all
aspects of process and user management. In-depth analytics capabilities are not available, but the vendor
plans to offer integration with a third-party BI solution in future releases. The rules-management capabilities
are rudimentary, but Cuecent offers a rules-definition interface, which it plans to extend to a full-featured
decision-support system in the October 2010 release of version 5.1.

Cuecent ESB means the BPM platform does not have to rely on third-party EAI solutions for system-to-
system integration. Key aspects of the ESB include the ability to define message-routing workflow, queries,
and GUI-based network-monitoring capabilities. The key business benefit however is the ability to connect
multiple channels, so for example, a financial services provider or bank can integrate mobile phones,
handheld devices, web, fixed-line telephones, and back-office operations. From a business service
standpoint, a bank would be able to connect ATMs, SMS banking, Internet banking, IVR, and branches.
Cuecent offers an out-of-the-box solution called Integrated Channel Manager (ICM) built on top of the ESB to
facilitate multi-channel integration. Other features include support for multiple industry-specific message
formats, enterprise systems, communication methods, and communications protocols.

All of Bahwan CyberTek products are developed in house from the ground up. While this is not a direct
strength of the solution, it does point toward a high degree of cohesion among the modules. Bahwan has
identified the gaps that exist in BPM suites and aims to address these by enabling organizations to take a
holistic view of their processes including human workflow, systems, applications, and content. For
organizations where many business processes are still paper-intensive, this will reduce the amount of paper
and in turn the amount of manual processing, driving efficiency across the organization. The vendor is also
planning to develop a mathematical optimization engine as part of the decision-support solution.

The BPM offering should be viewed in conjunction with the vendor’s service-delivery and product-
implementation capabilities. Bahwan CyberTek is a CMMi level 5 organization with extensive service-delivery
experience. With a multi-tiered solution stack, it is able to offer a flexible deployment roadmap at both a
strategic and operational level. The strategic approach to BPM could be top-down, bottom-up, or a mix of the
two. From an operational standpoint, Bahwan CyberTek offers quick-start packages in the form of pre-
configured solution frameworks for automating business-critical processes. For organizations in the financial
services, banking, and insurance sectors, this is a key benefit because it drastically reduces time to value.
The vendor also offers a fully functional ERP system built on top of the ebPAC platform.

In Ovum’s opinion, BCT’s offering is a multi-faceted comprehensive solution, but areas for improvement exist.
The BPM suite would benefit from the addition of enterprise goal-management functionality that would enable
organizations to define business goals and measure progress against them, as well as take decisions based
on near-real-time data from business processes across the organization. In terms of technical capabilities,
Ovum is of the view that enterprise-architecture functionality would add incremental value to the product.

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Figure 1: Cuecent BPM Process Engine Architecture and Interfaces

Source: Bahwan CyberTek OVUMBUTLERGROUP

Product Operation

Cuecent BPM is built on Java and J2EE platforms and consists of a few loosely coupled modules. A typical
process flow is initiated in the visual BPMN modeler where a business analyst defines the process using the
BPMN component palette. Apart from being a widely adopted standard, the other advantage of using BPMN
is that a lot of detail can be captured at the design stage. The BPMN modeler is a Java application and can
run on any user desktop that provides a Java runtime environment. Process-simulation enables users to
assess the impact of process changes in the business environment by creating multiple “what-if” scenarios
using real-time, historical, and estimated process data values. Users can simulate process flows to predict
likely performance and the potential impact of change on business-critical parameters including cycle time,
process-resource utilization, and process costs. Process flows defined in the BPMN modeler can be imported
in the ebPAC for further customization and the addition of execution details.

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The ebPAC module includes the Business Flow Builder, Process Builder, and Service Builder tools to create
process components that map to the process flow defined in the BPMN modeler. Process developers can add
further detail or business logic, or customize each process component using the process and service-builder
tools (see Figure 1 for a schematic diagram of the platform’s architecture). The Execution Engine component
executes the XPDL process model sequentially and feeds live data to the process-monitoring and reporting
tool. Cuecent ebPAC provides a web-based portal for managing user interactions. The module also includes
an administration portal through which users can access the reporting tool, the rules engine, and the BAM
module. Processes deployed on the ebPAC can be exposed to third-party applications in the form of web
services or an Enterprise Java Beans API. The user-tasks API component enables enterprise applications to
interact with the platform and assign tasks to users. On top of the process-integration interface is a forms-
builder interface for designing user interactions. Cuecent BPM also enables users to build and use their
organization’s SOA environment (powered by the Cuecent ESB) to create business processes from low-level
services with a service-builder tool.

All features, service definitions, and message transformations available in the ESB are defined as BPMN
processes. Integrations using the ESB can be exposed as services that can be consumed by the workflows
built using the ebPAC platform. Another notable feature is message-transformation flexibility. Messages can
be transformed pre-transport, pre-delivery, or during transport, based on source/destination or message
content.

Figure 2: Cuecent ESB

Source: Bahwan CyberTek OVUMBUTLERGROUP

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The Cuecent BAM module offers much more than just business-activity monitoring. It provides insight into
real-time as well as the historical state of business activities, including time to completion and time in queue.
It also offers automatic alerts and notifications, dashboards and reports on processes/users/groups/roles with
drill-down capability, SLA definition at a granular level including the ability to override SLAs for individual
users/roles/groups, user task lists that support integration with user-specific applications, process simulation
with what-if scenarios based on real-time or historic process data, ad hoc process-flow definition and
management, and case management.

Product Emphasis

The solution’s emphasis lies in delivering BPM over a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). BPM over SOA
allows organisations to leverage the benefits of BPM over an interconnected fabric of all applications present
within the enterprise. Self service portals can be created on top of this layer to enable centralized access to
all information within the organisation. This architecture combines the benefits of both SOA and BPM,
enabling a flexible, extensible, and secure IT environment.

DEPLOYMENT

Cuecent BPM suite deployment can take anything from two weeks to 12 months depending on the number of
processes implemented. For example, a deployment scenario that passes through 10 nodes where each
node represents a decision step, human interface, or integration step, takes about two to three weeks to
implement. Client-side resources required for this type of deployment would include a business analyst, two
process developers, and one tester. Skills required would include expertise in Java, J2EE, business domain,
databases, and application integration. For a larger deployment footprint (up to 10 processes),
implementation time would be up to three months. The deployment team size would also increase, requiring
two additional process developers and an additional tester. For a large-scale deployment where up to 50
processes need to be automated, implementation time would be nine months to a year. The resource
requirements would include two business analysts, six process developers, and three testers from the client
side.

Bahwan CyberTek has consultants with domain and technology expertise to help client organizations deploy
the BPM platform and implement business processes on top of it. It also has pre-configured solution
frameworks for rapid deployment. The solution can be deployed on-premise or hosted out of Cuecent’s data
centers. In addition, there is a managed on-premise deployment option where the solution is managed hands-
on or remotely by a Cuecent team. A multi-tenant (hosted) deployment option is planned for later this year.

BCT has a three-tier technical support program priced at 15%, 18%, and 22% of the license costs. Tier 3
support includes web, phone, and email-based support during normal business hours on weekdays. Tier 2
offers the same support seven days a week. Tier 1 support is aimed at large organizations with mission-
critical requirements. It offers round-the-clock support seven days a week.

Cuecent BPM can be deployed on Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, 2003, and 2008), HP/UX 11.x, IBM AIX 5L
5.x, Solaris 8.x and 9.x, and Red Hat Linux (2.1, 3, 4, and 5). For deployment it requires a J2EE application
server such as IBM WebSphere, JBOSS, or Oracle WebLogic. It supports all major databases including
Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL Server, and DB2.

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Bahwan CyberTek has over 300 customers around the world, primarily in India, North America, the Middle
East, and Africa. Its Cuecent BPM platform has been deployed in more than 20 organizations. Key clients
include:

 A large real-estate development company in UAE, which has an enterprise-wide implementation to

automate construction-management, property-management, customer-management, and sales-
management processes.

 A large private bank in India, which has a business-unit-level deployment to automate its Swift
messaging infrastructure.

 A large bank in Oman with an enterprise-wide deployment for integrating its banking channels to
create a network and integrate with third-party organizations.

 A government entity in Asia with an enterprise-wide deployment for automating key processes such
as document management, customer service and support, registration review and approval, lease
management, and utility management.

PRODUCT STRATEGY

Bahwan CyberTek’s marketing strategy has a vertical focus on industries such as banking, insurance,
financial services, government and public sector, energy and utilities, and manufacturing and supply chain. Its
geographical focus is on the US, India, the Middle East, and Africa, but it is looking to expand into eastern
Europe and east Asia. In terms of company size, it targets mid-market to large organizations with revenues in
the range of $10 million to $500 million.

Bahwan CyberTek’s route to market is a mix of direct and indirect sales. Indirect sales are mainly through
systems-integrator partners and OEM agreements. In terms of revenue, the sales effort is mainly consulting
sales, which account for nearly 80% of the company’s revenue. OEM and partner-driven sales account for
10% each, but are limited to the US and India. Bahwan CyberTek plans to increase indirect sales through
partnerships, OEM agreements, and by introducing an SaaS delivery model. The company also plans to
expand the target geography for indirect sales to reach the global market. According to Bahwan CyberTek,
the ideal revenue distribution would be 40% from direct sales, 20% from SaaS deployments, with the rest
from partner-driven sales and OEM agreements.

Implementation and distribution partners include Virtusa and Defiance Tech Private Ltd. The vendor also has
technology partnerships with SmartStream and Oracle. It is looking for global SI partners to extend its reach
in target geographies as well as its deployment footprint in key accounts.

Bahwan CyberTek offers perpetual per-core licenses for the Cuecent BPM platform. It does not charge for
client-access licenses, so customer organizations can scale up to any number of users as long as the
deployment footprint does not increase. Bahwan CyberTek offers special pricing models to OEM and SI
partners based on their target geography. For the pre-configured frameworks it offers a runtime license of the
BPM platform per solution framework with no upper cap on the number of CPUs.

A small-scale deployment would cost about $100,000, equally split between license fees and services costs.
An average-sized deal would cost about $250,000 with the license-services split at 40%-60%. A typical
medium-scale deployment would involve about 10 automated business processes configured for high
availability across the organization. A large deployment would cost about $1.5 million, of which 70% would be
the implementation services component.

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Bahwan CyberTek releases one major and one minor version of the Cuecent BPM platform every year. Patch
releases are timed to coincide with bug fixes. The future roadmap of the solution includes support for BPMN
v2.0, enhancements to the BRE to support forecasting, enhancements to the Forms Builder interface to
support Web 2.0 mashup services, a SaaS version, and more industry-specific solution frameworks.

COMPANY PROFILE

Bahwan CyberTek is a fully owned subsidiary of Oman-based Bahwan Group. Founded in 1999, the
company shifted focus toward product development in 2004 when the first version of the Cuecent BPM
platform was released. Bahwan CyberTek is headquartered in Chennai, India, and its product-development
centre is also in Chennai. It also has a large services arm that undertakes custom application development,
application maintenance, and support projects in addition to its other IT services offerings. Bahwan CyberTek
has nearly 1,200 employees in Oman, UAE, India, and the US. The company does not publish financial
figures.

SUMMARY

The BPM space is one of the few growing areas in the enterprise software market that has scope for further
expansion. If this potential is viewed in context of emerging geographies such as India and the Middle East
the synergies present a clear untapped opportunity for BPM vendors. Organizations have voiced the need for
automated human-centric business processes, as well as enterprise-integration solutions that also provide a
governance layer. Bahwan CyberTek, although a relative newcomer on the enterprise software scene, is
suitably placed to deliver on both counts. The BPM space is highly competitive, with some of the largest IT
vendors competing with smaller vendors for market share. However, Bahwan CyberTek has gained good
traction in its target market with its consulting-driven sales approach. Ovum believes that BPM vendors
looking to sell in emerging markets such as India and the Middle East need to direct a significant portion of
their marketing spend towards educating the target market, and Bahwan CyberTek shares this view. From a
technology perspective, we consider Bahwan’s offering to be superior, and suitable for mid-sized to large
enterprises.

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Table 1: Contact Details

Bahwan CyberTek Inc USA Bahwan CyberTek Pvt Ltd (HQ)

Suite 312 Bahwan CyberTek IT Park
209 West Central Street 148, Rajiv Gandhi Salai (OMR)
Natick Okkiyam Thoraipakkam
MA 01760 Chennai – 600097
USA India
Tel: +1 (508) 652 0001 Tel: +91 44 43 44 9000
Fax: +1 (508) 652 9781 Fax: +91 44 43 44 9222
Email: bcti@bahwancybertek.com Email: bctpl@bahwancybertek.com
www.bahwancybertek.com

Bahwan CyberTek LLC Oman Bahwan CyberTek FZ LLC UAE

PO Box 97, Office No. 206, Building No.1
Wadi Kabir -117 Ist Floor, Dubai Internet City
Sultanate of Oman PO Box 500061
Dubai, UAE
Tel: +968 2456 7154 Tel : +97 14 3911850
Fax: +968 2456 7148 Fax : +97 14 3911840
Email: bctpl@bahwancybertek.com Email: bctpl@bahwancybertek.com

Source: Bahwan CyberTek OVUMBUTLERGROUP

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