Product Description

Agile Business Suite

Agile Business Suite (AB Suite) is a complete rapid application development and deployment environment that enables enterprises to quickly implement new processes and encapsulate business knowledge as reusable components in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment.

Agile Business Suite offers model-based and model-driven development capabilities ( implementing elements of OMG’s platform independent and platform specific models ) that allow users to define and modify applications at a higher level of abstraction (“what” it should do, rather than “how”) than traditional 3GL languages, such as C++ and Java. Once the application requirements are defined in the model, Agile Business Suite translates those requirements and specifications into a fully functional application that is customized for the target deployment environment.

Overview AB Suite as PowerPoint Slide

Developers are able to design, develop, generate, and deploy applications to a diverse range of runtime platforms—all from a single, high-level application model—and without making changes to that model. Agile Business Suite provides a complete runtime environment to support the solution— customized for the specific deployment platform.

Agile Business Suite is comprised of two major components:

• Agile Business Suite Developer, which includes the System Modeller, Builder, Debugger and Version Control.

  • System Modeller in AB Suite Developer provides a model-based, object oriented development environment. It enables a development team to model and build an application from the ground up, including the end-user presentation, classes, and objects that represent business logic and automatic generation of the associated database tables. It is installed on a Microsoft® Windows® workstation, and operates as a plug-in to Microsoft Visual Studio. 

• AB Suite Runtime, which is installed on the target runtime platform, and provides an infrastructure in which the deployed AB Suite components will run. The runtime environment is different for each of the target platforms supported by Agile Business Suite: Windows .NET, Unisys ClearPath, and J2EE application servers, including JBoss, WebSphere, and WebLogic.

Agile Business Suite is the one application development and deployment product suite that can define, generate, and manage complete, highly-scalable, real-world composite applications – applications that are easily adapted to changes in business rules and processes and which can be deployed across multiple operating environments.

Agile Business Suite is better than .NET and Java (J2EE) alone, providing such differentiators as: 

• A higher level of definition

• Platform independence

• Ability to mask complexity

• Capturing the what without worrying about the how

Innovation

Today’s world is a world of change. AB Suite meets the challenge of managing change in several highly innovative ways:

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) a key theme of the product. AB Suite is designed as an SOA enabler having the ability to re-use components where appropriate. AB Suite enables organizations to respond quickly to a new business opportunity or a competitive threat. With AB Suite, you can build composite applications quickly and easily, re-using the right elements from existing applications melded with new components to meet the business needs

• AB Suite is probably a one-of-its-kind product available today. AB Suite can generate 100% of the application across multiple platforms, spanning multiple technologies, supporting various web based client front ends all from a single model file.

• AB Suite turns business rules into deployed code – no need to learn programming languages – AB Suite uses several intelligent code generators based on a common core to do so.

• Make a change, AB Suite re-creates and deploys only the detected changes – the in-built analyser looks for changes and intelligently selects what is needed for re-creation and deployment

• AB Suite reorganizes your database AND its data if something material changes – The built-in schema checker re-orders your data reliably and efficiently based on what you changed with no need to specify what is required

• If you need to debug but want to use the latest host-based data – like legal, actuarial or customer databases – then AB Suite has that capability – The built-in debugger provides access to host based data and knows its layout too!

• Want to change hardware platform or software Operating System due to a company change in IT direction? AB Suite enables you do so at the click of a mouse – no re-writes, no angst and no delay.

• The application can be developed by the Business Analyst without recourse to expensive IT resources, but with the System Modeller based on Visual Studio from Microsoft, it is familiar territory for the programmers too.

• The handling of transactions uses an algorithm to ensure the minimum computing resources are used.

• Generate different client types without making a single change to the business model. The various client generators allow companies to become rapidly web capable – or even PDA capable without writing any client code.

Performance

Rapid Application Development is a term often used to show how performance can be enhanced to provide rapid results. AB Suite takes it to a new level by enabling prototypes, then small applications and then complete, enterprise-wide, integrated applications to be developed - based on the business model. In recent cases, significant and measurable reductions in development time for applications have been seen.

There are always time savings to be made when AB Suite is used. The standard operations such as data validation in database lookups and error reporting are intrinsic functions of the product – they are provided automatically without having to be specified.

AB Suite is designed to handle transactions reliably. The architecture of the product is designed with this in mind. With anticipated numbers of end-users of any one system in the thousands and transaction counts of over two hundred per second, AB Suite is designed to perform to the highest industry standards for demanding customers such as banks, insurance companies and airlines. It is equally at home in schools where users often demand ‘one log-on per day’ and extended idle times measured in hours.

Built-in features such as Two Phase Commit, and integration with messaging products such as OLTP and MSMQ provide almost open ended expansion with reliability. The Web Service generators allow systems to meet the interoperability needs of the B2B world, while other parts of the product allow integration with external services such as mail, other web services and automata.

Potential

Agile Business Suite performs on three principal platforms:

• Windows .NET in a managed C# environment

• ClearPath mainframes from Unisys Corporation

• J2EE with JBoss, WebSphere and WebLogic Application Server environments on Unix, Linux and Windows .NET

It supports Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and Unisys databases as appropriate to the operating environment.

With that intrinsic flexibility, all companies everywhere can say that AB Suite would meet its needs in the high speed, resilient transaction processing environment.

AB Suite is designed to manage change, so a change in platform or scope becomes a simple operation within the AB Suite System Modeller. 

One of our customers in Germany is already live with a brand new application using this product. There are many other enterprise level customers across the globe working actively to go live with this product in 2007. These include: 

• A large Health Insurance Company in Europe

• A large Bank in Europe

• An Insurance company in Asia Pacific

• An automobile company in Asia Pacific

• A Public Sector organisation in the USA and

• An Education System provider in USA

With a world-wide support network provided by Unisys, being the other side of the globe presents no barrier to the successful use of AB Suite.

AB Suite also supports the many languages of the commercial world. It supports multi-byte character sets so that true global enterprises can use the local presentation layer of choice, yet still be able to have common applications.

AB Suite is being considered by leading analysts as being unique and way-ahead of the competition by many years.

Other information the judges should know

Agile Business Suite was developed at the Australian Centre for Unisys Software (ACUS). ACUS is the focus of Unisys Corporation research and development (R&D) activities in Australia.

The organization was formed in September 1987 under the Australian Federal Government’s Partnership for Development programme, and has more than achieved its objectives in exceeding its exporting targets.

ACUS is one of the largest private-sector software R&D organisation in Australia in terms of depth and spread of activi¬ties undertaken, and scope of operations.

ACUS employs around 100 staff in Australia.

Achievements at ACUS

• 1987 - 1996

  • World's first commercially available X.500

  • World's first commercially available Office Document Architecture (ODA) product

  • Leaders in OSI Message Handling Security (MHS)

  • World leaders in Open Distributed Processing (ODP)

  • Led NIST X.400 Security SIG to stability and alignment and are now world leaders in OSI Security

  • Founding member and supplier of ODA Consortium (ODAC)

  • Led unification of the ISO ODP and CCITT Distributed Application Framework (DAF) work programs to common ODP standards

  • Hosted the first Australian ODP Workshop, which has led to several successful joint projects with Australian universities

  • Led ISO RDA to Draft International Standard (DIS) status

  • Demonstrated RDA at world's first RDA show (SQL Access)

  • Consistently exceeded Partnership for Development obligations

  • Established high profile in the Australian Human Factors Engineering (HFE) arena by establishing an HFE facility

• 1997 - 2004

  • Transitioned responsibility for LINC product from New Zealand to Australia

  • Achieved IS0-9000 (1997) certification in 1997

  • Achieved ISO-9000 (2000) certification in 2003

  • Released Enterprise Application Development product suite 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3

  • Achieved SEI CMM Level 2 accreditation in 2003

  • Awarded over 20 patents

• 2005 - 2006

  • Released next generation of Enterprise Application Development product suite – Agile Business Suite 1.0, 1.1, 1.2

Agile Business Suite has its own web site at www.agilebusinesssuite.com  It contains white papers and further information about AB Suite.

Agile Business Suite Version 1.2. White Paper (pdf)

Agile Business Suite Brochure/Flyer (pdf)