To recap, E2E is a 10-year old Switzerland-based system integrator for financial services firms that chanced upon the novel idea of making UML models executable. Last June, they announced plans for the next version of their product, E2E Bridge 4.0, which would support deployment through standard web services, add a high-performance transaction engine, and integrate with IDS Scheer’s ARIS business process modeling language.

Initial announcement of the 4.0 version roadmap was accompanied by announcement of partnership with IDS Scheer, the company whose initial claim to fame was its ARIS modeling language, which has been used by many SAP customers to model their processes in preparation for their ERP projects. A couple months later, E2E signed a similar alliance with PMOLink, IDS Scheer’s largest VAR in North America, providing their initial beachhead on this side of the pond.

And this week, they released 4.0, with a few late additions. It starts with Bridge 4 Process, the core offering billed as a BPM execution platform that takes the output of a BPM system via BPMN language, converts them to UML, and then generates Java byte code that can be exposed as web services. And, with the new integration to IDS Scheer’s ARIS modeling language, it can populate the UML models with elements from the event-driven process chains (EPC), which could include metrics for benchmarking business processes, which are beyond what BPMN can represent.

Additionally, as E2E promised last June, it released the transaction processing edition called Bridge 4 Xtreme. It contains the high performance event processing engine that the company spoke of last summer.

Beyond those two releases, E2E has added a couple offerings not part of the original plan. They include Bridge 4 Interfaces, intended for customers who already have large ERP installs, as a form of EAI. It’s a logical addition, given IDS Scheer’s large presence among SAP, and more recently, Oracle customers. And it offers a deluxe version that contains the BPM process integration, high through transaction engine, and the EAI capabilities, which is intended for software vendors who intend to offer their products on demand.

The release of 4.0 not only provides E2E partners with larger market presence, but for IDS Scheer, it helps plug a gap given their budding cooptition with SAP. Until now, IDS Scheer and SAP have complemented each other: IDS Scheer provides the models at design time that SAP customers use for configuring their SAP implementations. With SAP at long last adding plans for its own BPM execution, IDS Scheer’s tie-in with E2E provides entrée to the same market.

The parallels go deeper, as SAP’s BPM plans are based around the idea of making SAP process models directly executable, without the intermediate step of code generation. By the way, Microsoft has similar plans for its BPM roadmap, and it’s likely that other BPM pure plays that lack a Java EE platform will do the same. Thanks to its link with E2E’s executable UML, IDS Scheer Is arguably the first BPM modeling provider that could also play in the execution space.

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