October 2019 Release Announcement

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Learn about the latest product news and enhancements

From new releases to upgrades and enhancements, there is something for everyone: new features in ARIS Cloud, AI-augmented analytics in Alfabet, Adabas & Natural innovations and a wealth of treasures for Integration, IoT and Analytics platforms.

We could go on and on, but instead please take a look for yourself!

ARIS 10 SR10 release

Make change happen with ARIS and its unique combination of process analysis, design and monitoring. ARIS brings value to every single employee−from strategy to everyone−and empowers organizations to make better decisions. It spans from strategy and process design, risk and compliance management, rollout and change management, process mining and analysis to business automation (Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Internet of Things (IoT), SAP®).

ARIS 10 SR10 brings many new features to support your journey to process excellence:

  • New edition: ARIS Cloud Elements (available from January 2020)
  • New features for ARIS Cloud Advanced
  • New confirmation management
  • Smart modeling extensions (BPMN, DMN & RPA)
  • Process Mining extensions
  • ARIS RPA (robotic process automation)
  • And many others

With its new features ARIS empowers organizations to confidently run their business and support all transformational projects. You can start small with ARIS Cloud and grow big towards a powerful Enterprise Management System involving all employees to achieve operational excellence.

Where to find more information:

ARIS 10 SR 10 features presentation (Links: Uberflip, Partner Business Portal)
ARIS 10 SR 10 features fact sheet (Links: Uberflip, Partner Business Portal)

Alfabet 10.5

Strategic portfolio management is growing in use across companies’ intent on accelerating their digital transformation. With each new release, Software AG’s Alfabet ensures that every stakeholder can effectively contribute to and significantly benefit from the transformation program from strategy to execution. Alfabet 10.5 employs state-of-the-art technologies such as AI-augmented analytics and conversational UI features including a feedback facility to extend portfolio management beyond the IT organization, promote greater stakeholder participation and maximize the user experience. It extends the Kanban board concept into the realm of demands and investments for demand lifecycle management. For Gartner clients, the new release provides a framework for feeding data from the Gartner Hype Cycle into Alfabet to be used in creating the technology innovation roadmap.

  • Demand-to-Investment Kanban Board
  • Alfabet Feedback Bot
  • Voice-enabled AlfaBot Conversational User Interface
  • New Visualizations: Sunray diagram, Bubble Cloud Chart and Percentage Distribution report
  • Gartner Hype Cycle for Tech Innovation

Where to find more information:

Adabas & Natural October 2019 Release

The October 2019 release features many new innovations to support the Adabas & Natural 2050+ Agenda—to modernize and optimize your high-performing applications. This release also includes new features for CONNX, EntireX and ApplinX to help you unlock your data, reuse existing business logic and create better user experiences.

New innovations include:

  • Extended capabilities for mainframe zIIP offloading to cut costs on high-performing mainframe apps
  • New features to lift and shift Adabas & Natural to the cloud using containers such as Kubernetes® and Docker® for greater flexibility for your future IT landscape
  • Advanced API enablement to expose and consume API REST services quickly and easily
  • Real-time data integration features for actionable intelligence from your business logic
  • Encryption and security enhancements for replication, utilities and administration
  • Enhanced DevOps capabilities for NaturalONE, the Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment, that helps you accelerate delivery of high-value apps

View detailed Release Notes for respective products:

Cumulocity IoT Core Platform 10.5

With Cumulocity IoT Core Platform, end-2-end IoT applications can be built faster than ever, allowing you to prove the value of your IoT solutions much sooner. Cumulocity IoT can be deployed wherever you need it: In the Cloud, on-premises and on the edge. It combines our leading technologies ranging from secure device, cloud & enterprise integration over streaming & predictive analytics to process automation and application development.

Highlights of the latest release:

  • Offline Installation Support: An on-premise Cumulocity IoT cluster can now be installed and operated without requiring internet connectivity.
  • Angular WebSDK for Widgets: The Angular WebSDK now also allows for writing your own widgets. With this addition, the Angular WebSDK supports all functionality of the deprecated WebSDK for AngularJS.
  • You can now list and filter Devices and create Smart Groups based on your own custom properties.
  • Option to disable basic authentication and use Cumulocity IoT generated tokens instead for an enhanced platform security.
  • Performance Improvements for Measurement Data Ingestion which significantly improves the performance when ingesting complex measurement data structures.
  • Self-service streaming analytics using Apama Analytics Builder is included for all new tenants (with a restriction on number of models)

The complete Release Notes are available at Cumulocity IoT.

Cumulocity IoT Edge 10.5

Cumulocity IoT Edge is an onsite, single-server variant of the Cumulocity IoT Core platform. It is delivered as a virtual appliance designed to run on industrial PC’s or local servers.

In the Cumulocity IoT Edge 10.5 release we offer new Edge capabilities and enhancements:

  • Cumulocity IoT Edge 10.5 release is based on the 10.5 version of Cumulocity IoT Core . Therefore all new features in Administration, Cockpit, Device Management applications and related APIs are now available in Cumulocity IoT Edge.
  • Furthermore Edge 10.5 brings
    • Hyper-V support as an additional hypervisor.
    • Edge remote device management allows to register and remotely connect to one or multiple Edge devices from a Cumulocity Cloud Tenant via the Cloud remote-access UI.
    • Furthermore we have made some additional Edge specific performance, quality, packaging and stability improvements.
    • Edge Microservice Hosting preview: For customer who are part of the Software AG Early Participant Program, we offer a first preview of the Cumulocity Microservice Hosting capabilities on the Edge. This allows you to easily deploy, run and monitor your custom microservices on the Edge.
  • Cumulocity IoT Edge 10.5 includes Apama streaming analytics, so please also refer to the Apama 10.5 release announcement.

Note: The release date of Cumulocity IoT Edge 10.5 is 22.11.2019.

Release Notes are available at Cumulocity IoT.

Apama 10.5

Software AG's Apama Streaming Analytics is the market-leading platform for streaming analytics and intelligent automated action on fast-moving big data and is used by the Cumulocity IoT platform. The latest release adds:

New capabilities for Analytics Builder for Cumulocity IoT:

  • Analytics Builder available for Cumulocity IoT Core, as well as Cumulocity IoT Edge, bringing self-service analytics to all Cumulocity customers
  • Block SDK allows you to develop custom analytic blocks extending to help you use Analytics Builder for more use cases
  • New blocks for handling alarms, events, managed objects and operations. e.g. create models that 1) output alarms on temperature breaches and 2) use alarms as input triggers

Enhancements to Apama Microservice for Cumulocity IoT:

  • New web-based EPL editor allows creating and management of EPL apps and incorporates syntax highlighting and validation (first available in Cumulocity IoT Core 10.4.6)
  • EPL app samples provided in the EPL editor to allow you to get started quickly with sample apps covering a large number of common use cases
  • All Cumulocity tenants now include Apama Starter which allows running an unlimited number of Smart Rules and 3 Analytics Builder models
  • Communicating with other microservices from EPL apps is now easier with new helper functions. e.g. Easily score incoming data against Machine Learning models in the Predictive Analytics microservice

Apama release notes are available at Tech Community.

Apama Analytics Builder release notes are available at Tech Community.

Apama Microservice for Cumulocity IoT release notes are available in the Cumulocity IoT release notes at Cumulocity IoT.

Zementis 10.5

Zementis is a decision engine for operational deployment, management and execution of AI and Machine Learning models. Zementis comes in three major flavors and is available as a stand-alone platform in the cloud and on-prem, as a microservice application in Cumulocity IoT and as a plugin component on top of various Hadoop-based data storage platforms and stream processing engines.

The Predictive Analytics microservice in Cumulocity IoT now comes with:

  • Codeless device data and ML model interface mapping
  • Scheduling of batch prediction jobs
  • Zementis engine in all flavors now offers:
    • Enhanced support for Time Series Models
      • - Support for Seasonal ARIMA forecasting
    • Enhanced support for CNN architectures like MobileNet, VGGNet, ResNet and RetinaNet.
      • - Support for Object Localization along with object detection
    • Compliance with latest release of PMML 4.4 including:
      • - Support for Lag expressions with aggregate functions
      • - Support for Anomaly Detection Models

Open Source releases:

Release Notes are available at Tech Community.

Cumulocity IoT DataHub 10.5

Cumulocity IoT DataHub is a new analytical extension for Cumulocity, focused on enabling historical storage and analysis of IoT data that enables a customer to:

  • Periodically, incrementally offload Cumulocity data (inventory, alarms, events and measurements) from the Cumulocity operational storage to a customer’s data lake.
    • Amazon Web Services S3 for deployments in AWS;
    • Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 for deployments in Microsoft Azure;
    • Local file storage or Minio S3 for on-premise deployments.
  • Store IoT data in cheaper long-term storage in a format optimized for analysis and ability to manage own retention rules.
  • Run high performance queries on IoT data via SQL based tools (including BI and ML tools) using standard interfaces – ODBC & JDBC drivers are available as well as via Apache Arrow Flight and REST using a highly-scalable Data-as-a-service engine.

DataHub is available for customers with dedicated or on-premise Cumulocity instances.

TrendMiner 2019.R3

TrendMiner 2019.R3 allows process manufacturing enterprises to build an analytics-driven Production Cockpit, providing real-time actionable business insights to control operational performance. Each stakeholder from "control room to boardroom" can have their own actionable Production Cockpit; complete with dashboard, analytics suite and agile communications facilities. It also streamlines the flow of information between shifts, from shift teams to engineers and can provide live production views and historical analysis from the remotest factory to expertise located anywhere. We have also extended the capabilities for cross and inter-departmental collaboration, provide cross-asset performance analysis and provide webhooks to trigger workflows in and from 3rd party business applications. Deeper integration with external systems such as SAP can be done through the support of Software AG’s webMethods. This latest TrendMiner release is of particular interest to companies in the chemicals, oil & gas, water & wastewater, utilities, pharmaceuticals, food processing and metals & mining sectors.

TrendMiner 2019.R3 enhancement overview:

  • Production Cockpit with LIVE mode and alert tiles, which can be exported in HTML format
  • Create Comments & attachments to context items for inter- and cross departmental collaboration
  • Value based search across similar assets for fleet wide performance analysis
    • Use webhook-integration to continue workflows in 3rd party business applications based on events monitored in TrendMiner
    • Control access rights to (parts of) the asset framework to align with your corporate structure
    • A variety of application enhancements based on customer feedback and to complete development themes in our product
    • Addition of an In-App on-boarding and engagement tool

Link for more information or at TrendMiner.

webMethods 10.5

Software AG's webMethods products empower you to build solutions on the top-rated hybrid integration platform and integrate cloud-based apps and on-premises systems without coding, simplify with one toolset for on-premises and cloud integrations and use microservices-style architecture to deliver and scale new integrations faster. Here are the key highlights of this release.

Integration, B2B & Process

  • Integration Server allows developers to develop REST consumer from a given Swagger v2.0 API descriptor.
  • Integration Server provides native support for MQTT by allowing developers to define MQTT based trigger and provides public services for MQTT based pub/sub messaging with an MQTT server.
  • Integration Server provides support for a new REST based API for administration purposes. This API enhances the DevOps capabilities of Integration Server.
  • Integration Server supports Solace as a JMS provider and can send and receive data using Solace messaging infrastructure.
  • When publishing SOAP or REST based APIs to webMethods API Gateway, developers can now specify the API name and version.
  • Designer Service Development allows developers to develop a REST consumer by providing the Swagger v2.0 interface document for a REST API provider.
  • Software AG has launched a new lightweight development tool called webMethods Service Designer. It can be downloaded from the Software AG Tech Community website.
  • Integration Server supports connectivity to 3rd party JMS providers using SSL-based connectivity. Integration Server supports both one-way and two-way SSL connectivity with JMS providers.
  • Software AG Designer enhances the performance of data fetching for GraphQL by providing support for GraphQL dataloaders.
  • CloudStreams Server now supports Server Name Indication (SNI) for Applications/Platforms websites. SNI allows multiple websites to exist on the same IP address.
  • The full-text search support in webMethods OneData which was being used by many customers is available with the Current Nova UI which will benefit lot of existing implementations.
  • With Command Central, it is easy to import composite and micro templates from your own repository or from the default Software AG’s GitHub repository.
  • In Universal Messaging, user can monitor both asynchronous and synchronous subscription to a specific queue similar to the monitoring of connections to durable subscribers.
  • With Universal Messaging, it is possible to purge a range of event IDs or a single event ID on a queue.
  • Monitoring and Agents features are available in the new Active Transfer user interface.
  • Support for archiving transaction data in Active Transfer is available for the Oracle and MS SQL databases.
  • The AgileApps platform is able to send SAML assertions to MashZone to render MashZone dashboards on AgileApps user interface.
  • The classical Process Engine supports hosting on a Docker container and can also be initialized in the Microservices Runtime.
  • Terracotta Ehcache now supports write behind which is asynchronous writing of data to system of record.
  • Terracotta 10.5 clients for both cache and store can co-exist with any BigMemory Max 4.3. x client.

API Management & Microservices

Software AG’s webMethods API Portal provides a comprehensive solution that allows the developer community to find, learn about, discuss, and test an organization’s APIs. webMethods API Gateway securely exposes APIs to consumers, third-party developers, and other partners for use on web, mobile and IoT applications. webMethods Microgateway is an independent offering which is light-weight, agile, and fast. It works with webMethods API Gateway or as a standalone solution to control API access to microservices in a distributed environment. It supports service mesh architectures offering independent and sidecar deployments.

  • The API Engagement Platform is a new product added to our Software AG API Management Stack. It is a developer outreach platform for API businesses. This is a cloud-native and cloud-only platform for all the API brands to reach the right developers and partners. It helps them with the growth of their API business and revenues.
  • API engagement platform allows you to build an eco-system around the APIs you want to offer as products. With this, you can manage APIs as products , proactively promote, market and launch APIs as well as engage the developer community and foster collaboration and run campaigns and evangelize API usage and adoption.
  • API providers can now use custom extensions (also known as custom runtime policies) in the API policy stages like Identify & access, request rrocessing, routing, response processing and error handling.
  • Team work support in API Gateway provides isolation for multiple teams working in single API Gateway.
  • API First Implementation closes the gaps in the support we had and made it easier.
  • Externalization of configurations in API Gateway – API Gateway configurations can be read from a file or provided via an API.
  • To ensure API Gateway being source of truth, CentraSite now has the capability to publish the APIs to API Portals through the API Gateways where it is deployed. This allows the API Provider to choose which endpoints and stages must be exposed in the API Portal.
  • Microservices Runtime supports OpenShift. The Software AG github website provides the sample openshift scripts.
  • webMethods Microgateway introduces support for a few additional policies in the following stages: Identify and access policies, Identify and authorize application, Hostname address, IP address range, and SSL enhancements.
  • Microgateway now supports configuration of SSL truststore and keystores based on API Gateway configuration.
  • Microgateway now supports configuration of all aliases using environment variables which simplifies the configuration of Microgateway containers in Kubernetes deployment files.

For further details, please refer to the webMethods 10.5 Release Notes.