New product innovations release 9.12

Knowledge base
, , , , , , , ,
1

Issue 4, 2016                                                                                  

 Download PDF

What’s new in popular Software AG products  

Learn what is new in the 9.12 product release from Software AG this October. From transaction processing to streaming analytics, there are a host of new capabilities you will want to explore for Adabas & Natural, Alfabet, Apama, ARIS, Mashzone and Universal Messaging as well as a new device integration platform.

  1. Adabas & Natural

The new releases in the Adabas & Natural product family deliver, as usual, a blend of new and extended enhancements:

  • Specifically requested by our customers (e.g., via Brainstorm)
  • Ensuring the products continue to meet customers’ expectations in terms of stability, performance and productivity
  •  Allowing customers to leverage their Adabas & Natural applications in their transformation into a Digital Enterprise 

Highlights of the most recent release for Adabas & Natural include:

  • Natural for AJAX - Mobile support with responsive controls
  • NaturalONE - Additional features for DevOps (e.g., team concept support for batch applications)
  •  Adabas LUW - Enhanced security for Adabas Utilities
  •  Adabas Analytics - Integration in Adabas kernel and interface with Apama
  •  Adabas Manager - GUI wizards for critical administration tasks (e.g., backup and restore)

In addition, two new solutions are now available that help customers innovate faster:

  • Natural API Management - Leverage webMethods API Management for business services implemented in Natural
     
  • Natural Rule Automation - Extend the usage of core Natural applications to business process management and rules automation  

The new releases of EntireX and ApplinX (both included in the webMethods Suite) not only respond to requirements from Adabas & Natural customers but also deliver new and enhanced functionality for the growing number of webMethods customers using this technology to integrate their mainframe systems.  For example, EntireX provides enhanced support for COBOL and new versions of COBOL compilers. 

Alfabet 9.12

Release 9.12 of Alfabet for IT planning, portfolio management and Enterprise Architecture (EA) boasts several significant new capabilities targeting integration and interoperability with other products. Today’s digitalization-driven business environment requires an agile IT that can deliver quickly. IT practices—in particular IT planning and portfolio management—must strive for greater integration to meet the demands of digital business.

Alfabet 9.12 offers interoperability with Software AG’s CentraSite enabling customers to implement effective services governance with end-to-end service lifecycle management from planning to execution.

Also included in this release is a ServiceNow® integration which helps relate data from the CMDB/ITSM on IT deployments and locations, performance metrics and actual changes to Alfabet to better understand change impact on deployed IT, obtain intelligence for portfolio analysis and be assured that deployed IT follows strategy. A new ARIS-Alfabet showcase highlights the ARIS-Alfabet interoperability features for business assessment and definition of portfolio change activities needed for business and IT transformation.

Apama 9.12

Software AG's Apama Streaming Analytics is the market-leading platform for streaming analytics and intelligent automated action on fast-moving big data.

  • Apama Community Edition provides a free and easy way to get started using Apama
  • Apama Core Community Edition delivers a lightweight Apama for Intel® and ARM that can be re-distributed
  • Integration with Software AG digital event services
  • Universal Messaging integration using connectivity plug-ins
  • Connectivity plug-in enhancements make developing using connectivity plug-ins significantly easier
  •  Apama queries enhancements
  •  “Optional” data type added to EPL allowing values to be identified as empty
  • Decimal data type support extended to allow use within data views, dashboards and plug-ins
  • Dashboard user interfaces enhanced with the addition of a Tab Control object
  • Command Central integration extended to enable many more management tasks from a browser
  • Capital Markets adapters extended with a new adapter for connecting to EBS Direct using the FIX 4.4 protocol
  • Capital Markets adapters upgraded and enhanced for EBS Ai, Reuters MAPI and CME iLink

Learn more in the Apama release notes in the Software AG product documentation.

ARIS 9.8 Service Release (SR) 6

The new ARIS release provides advanced search functionalities, especially for creating and saving search filters. Users can access relevant information much easier and faster. Settings of collaboration permissions for viewers have been improved and enable more efficient and restricted collaboration. The table-based modeling capability has been enhanced and allows faster and easier modeling using the keyboard.

The new release offers the most comprehensive cloud offering in the BPA market by adding ARIS Mobile and ARIS GRC to the cloud. Furthermore, ARIS GRC is more closely integrated with the BPA world. Data import to ARIS Risk & Compliance Manager is much easier and the ARIS Report Server can be employed for GRC-related script-based reports.

End users also benefit from:

  • Matrix models and business model canvas in ARIS Connect and Cloud portal
  • Structured license distribution to different business units in the Central User Administration (UMC)
  • Method extensions to customer experience management
  • More restricted access rights for manager roles in ARIS Risk & Compliance Manager
  • Tenant management enhancements and easier database backup and reorganization

 Device Integration Platform

New for 9.12 is Device Integration Platform (DIP), provided by our OEM partnership with Cumulocity. The DIP provides a complete device management capability to manage any gateways or comms devices, industrial devices, assets, machines, etc. This supports a broad range of already pre-integrated and certified devices as well as device-side and server-side agents to connect new devices. Highlights of the platform include:

  • Connect new devices to your account and disconnect them
  • List, search and group the connected devices
  • View the details of the devices and check their status
  • Monitor the connection and the service of devices (including integration with SIM management platforms)
  • Device map available in the navigator to locate devices
  • Work with alarms from devices
  • Full remote configuration and control
  • Execute commands with "device shell"
  • Remote management of the software and the firmware on devices
  • Manage the credentials of devices
  • Troubleshoot devices        

Platform administration tools enable manual or automated (via APIs) creation of customers (tenants) and determine which applications they can access. It includes role-based access controls within each tenant, rule engine /real-time analytics configuration, password requirements, data retention and anything needed to manage the entire platform and each customer environment. All admin functions are available over APIs.

MashZone

MashZone NextGen Business Analytics 9.12

MashZone NextGen Business Analytics  9.12 introduces significant new visual data analytics capabilities to the Digital Business Platform. The 9.12 release brings exciting new enhancements in the area of dashboard creation including:

  • New data sources (e.g., Excel® and Software AG Process Performance Manager) and new visualizations
  • Brand new graphical feed editor empowering business analysts
  • Migration toolkit to support existing users replacing MashZone legacy deployments

 MashZone NextGen Visual Analytics 9.12


MashZone NextGen Visual Analytics 9.12 is a new product that provides exploratory, ad hoc analysis of streaming and historical data from multiple sources. The product has a particular focus on Internet of Things use cases, but the capabilities provided also support other use cases in retail, financial services—anywhere you have large amounts of data in motion. Visual analytics allows operations analysts, maintenance specialists, researchers, developers and data scientists to do their job  more effectively.

Capabilities include:

  • Explore, visualize and analyze real-time data streams
  • Explore, visualize and analyze historic data
  • Auto-discover and deploy new data sets
  • Quickly discover new data insights via automatic statistical profiles
  • Explore real-time and historic data sets using interactive visualizations
  • Filter data as you explore
  • Capture, save and share data explorations
  • Highlight and color measure visualizations using dimensions and other measures

Universal Messaging

Universal Messaging is a high performance multi-protocol messaging platform designed to provide fast, guaranteed message delivery across all mainstream enterprise, Web and Internet of Things end platforms. Universal Messaging is also the messaging backbone for the Software AG webMethods Integration Platform.

Key features for this release of Universal Messaging include:

Durable subscribers monitoring improvements provide additional capabilities from Enterprise Manager and Command Central for viewing the connections in use and the number of events outstanding in the queues.

Command Central integration extended to allow monitoring and editing of channels and queues. The Web interface now also allows creating server instances, searching for JNDI entries, channels and queues, viewing and editing access control lists and viewing and editing joins for channels or queues.

Improved handling of low memory situations ensure Universal Messaging is more resilient under heavy load situations.

Round-robin message publishing using Java® Message Services (JMS) connection factories provides a horizontally scalable way for publishing messages to multiple servers in a cluster.

Logging improvements allow the use of the alternative logging frameworks, Logback and Log4J 2, and log file entries are now categorized by the component that generated the entry making debugging easier.

Client future-proofing means that clients using the 9.12 client API can be supported for use against future versions of the server.

Summary

To learn more about these innovative changes, check out the product release notes for each product in Software AG product documentation.