Chordiant Intros Open Source-Based Collaboration Tools

Chordiant (Nasdaq: CHRD) has introduced a new set of collaborative tools it calls "Chordiant Mesh" that are designed to help users co-create new products or customize existing applications on the Chordiant Enterprise Platform.

A handful of customers have already used the toolset to design new applications around their specific processes.

For instance, one Chordiant customer, Gothaer Versicherungsbank, a mutual insurance company in Germany, used Chordiant Mesh to create a new insurance sales and customer service application.

Another used it to develop a mortgage case management project with global teams in India, London and the United States.

18-Month Window

The main driver behind the introduction of Chordiant Mesh, according to Greg Biggers, senior product manager, was the growing drag of the product development cycle -- a standard 18 months -- on customer productivity and company growth. "It is a problem that saddles much of the enterprise software world," he told CRM Buyer.

"The speed at which companies are introducing new business processes continues to accelerate. That, in turn, puts pressure on the product development cycles of most software products," Biggers explained.

In short, it takes 18 months to introduce a product that could well be based on processes nearly obsolete by the time it becomes generally available.

By introducing Chordiant Mesh, the company seeks to more closely align the product development cycle with changing corporate needs. "We wanted to reinvent product development to be a continuous conversation rather than a huge moment of truth," said Biggers.

The Secret Sauce

The design tools within Chordiant's platform let users of Chordiant Mesh create specific business applications.

"Built on industry standards, including J2EE and XML, the Chordiant Enterprise Platform separates business logic from application functionality and data," states a white paper on the Mesh approach. "This layered architecture increases adaptability and agility as process and policy logic can be changed quickly and without costly re-engineering," it claims.

Other features within the application that are leveraged in the Mesh network:

• Process and rules engines for case management and workload distribution based on user capacity, permissions and skills. Processes from the point of customer contact through back-office interactions can be automated using the Chordiant process and rules engines.
• Pre-built connectors that enable integration with existing operational systems, such as older systems of record, modelers, application servers and databases.
• Administration and business activity management tools that provide dashboards to help managers monitor, administer and adjust processes in real time.