BEA’s Liquid Thinking initiative isn’t just about applications or infrastructure, it’s about how you manage the processes that drive your business for greater business liquidity. Get the big picture from Mark Carges’ keynote presentation from BEAWorld Beijing on BEA SOA 360°: Business Optimization from Every Angle for Everyone. Read about a great example of a Liquid Thinker: Mike McCoy, director of architecture and quality engineering at Accredited Home Lenders, and how he and his team reimagined AHL’s architecture. And of course, check out this issue of Arch2Arch Advisor, which is dedicated to filling you in on the latest about business process management (BPM).

To start off, if you haven’t already taken the BPM Lifecycle Assessment survey, please complete this simple questionnaire now. You’ll receive a customized report that evaluates your BPM readiness and maturity, provides benchmarks that compare your organization to industry peers, and suggests business and technical steps to optimize your BPM strategy, execution, and value.

When bank holding company First Horizon implemented BPM, it developed a new culture based on business processes. An independent research report, First Horizon: A Case Study in BPM Success (Forrester Research, September 2006) reveals the seven steps to building this BPM culture, which delivered measurable business value for First Horizon.

A recent article in ComputerWorld spotlights BEA customer Integro Insurance Brokers, which uses BPM to help provide its clients with access to real-time account information through a portal. Another BEA customer, Dix Amico, Brazil’s second-largest health plan provider, now uses BPM to manage and optimize its processing of new enrollments.

This article presents important information for solutions architects and others responsible for designing software systems that are to be moved to BPM-based solutions. The article is aimed at anyone who wants to get an initial view of the BEA AquaLogic BPM Suite and the technology that underpins it.

Learn more about BPM from strategy to implementation in an on-demand Webinar featuring experts from Accenture and BEA. In another Webinar, hear Jennifer Kenny, former vice president for process design and mobilization at Wells Fargo Bank, as she shares BPM best practices gleaned from her experience.

Kick-start your BPM initiative with a one-day BPM Discovery Workshop, in which BEA experts walk IT and business team members through an analysis of your BPM readiness, pinpoint areas of focus and ROI, and recommend next steps. Next, the five-day BPM Foundation Workshop helps your team prioritize BPM opportunities, gather business requirements, start modeling priority processes, and discuss milestones for success.

BEA is partnering with leading telcos and service providers to offer RFID Managed Services, which help to speed and simplify RFID adoption. Join Telstra, GS1 Hong Kong, and BEA in this live Webinar.

With 17 sponsoring vendors, Service Component Architecture (SCA) represents a key initiative to produce next-generation service infrastructure. Michael Rowley, chair of SCA’s Java working group, will provide an overview of SCA and how it will impact technology strategy over the next two years. Rowley will cover the key elements of SCA, including assembly and composition, service authoring, and policy.

ESB-CON III, an executive-level online event, brings together top enterprise service bus (ESB) experts from IBM, BEA, Progress Software, and Oracle. In a hard-hitting keynote panel, these experts will provide world-class customer examples of how ESBs are shaping Fortune 500 IT and business.

In this on-demand Webinar, Sabre Holdings offers a close-up perspective on the challenges and rewards of its ambitious and highly successful SOA and Web Services implementation.

Here’s your OS for SOA: the next major release of BEA WebLogic Server and BEA Workshop for WebLogic, with greater ease of development, advanced Web services, and refinements throughout including enhancements to high-availability features, security, systems management, and more.

Reduce downtime and the costs of running your systems with BEA Guardian. This software management tool can prevent problems caused by version conflicts, bugs, performance degradations, and security vulnerabilities. BEA Guardian is based on a new architecture called “Pre-emptive Support” that performs root cause analysis utilizing Signature Patterns™—an industry-unique approach similar to antivirus definitions.