Introduction to StarPound CORE™

StarPound CORE™ is a business process modeling (BPM) application with a powerful development toolset to seamlessly integrates voice and data in one application.

The StarPound platform executes converged, composite applications supporting voice and data interactions. StarPound applications are created using StarPound Studio™, a flexible development environment built around the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) specification. Business analysts and developers work together in StarPound Studio to model and deploy multi-channel SOA applications to the StarPound Application Server.

A StarPound application can be initiated by a web link, by an incoming phone call or email, or by an incoming web service request.

Once initiated, the application can guide a customer through a web or voice interaction, storing data in an XML document or RowSet data structure. A very rudimentary example of a voice-enabled business process for a contact center might be as follows:

StarPound retrieves data from external systems using web services or database functions, and utilizes that data in web forms, voice prompts, outgoing email, or web service responses.

In workflow applications, StarPound creates a work assignment and dynamically routes the assignment through the process based on skills, permissions, financial costs, and availability of the workforce.

Workflow and Business Process Management

StarPound delivers convergence and SOA capabilities in the context of a business process. StarPound applications are created using StarPound Studio™, a business process modeling (BPM) application with a powerful development toolset.

Using StarPound Studio™, a business analyst or developer drags and drops process elements onto a work flow model to represent web services, web forms, IVR prompts, database queries, and more. When deployed, the resulting StarPound application controls the customer's interaction across all media channels and guides the customer through the necessary steps to complete the required task.

StarPound Development Lifecycle

Developing StarPound applications is essentially 3 step process:

Step 1: Application Modeling

StarPound Studio™ provides an easy-to-use drag and drop interface for building application models. A business analyst or process expert can use the elements in the Studio palette to construct a model representing the required business process functions. The analyst can also annotate the model to document the process.

Step 2: Application Development

From a basic StarPound Studio™ model, a technical analyst or a developer can quickly construct and deploy a working voice and data application. During the development cycle, the analyst or developer builds and polishes the voice or web interface for the application and configures data management through web services or RDBMS.

Step 3:Application Deployment

Once the application model is complete, the developer deploys it to the StarPound Application Server, the execution engine for StarPound. The StarPound application can then be launched by a user from a web page, phone call, incoming email, or web service call.

Scalability

The StarPound CORE™ Platform is written in J2EE (Java), which is a standard, scalable platform that forms the basis for many of today's modern enterprise applications. It has been tested under extreme loads and is scalable in both directions.

Running under what we consider to be a low-end commodity web server (P4, 3GHz CPU, 3GB RAM), with all components of the StarPound stack running on the same box (rather than being properly distributed, around 300 concurrent users were serviced. Deploying two StarPound servers (instead of one), and using load balancing under Apache, around 1,300 users were serviced concurrently. If you are running under newer hardware (Xeons/Core2, dual CPU, dual core, quad core, etc.), a much higher number of concurrent users could be supported.

Note: These tests were devised to determine the number of StarPound business process models could be executed at once. The tests did not involve the inclusion of telephony taks (call control, initiating calls, bridging, conference calls, etc.) Obviously, when dealing with process models that involve telephony tasks, the load on the server(s) will increase, and would need to be scaled properly.

We are planning a more in-depth report on the scalability of the StarPound platform. When available, it will be published here on this site.

Distributed Processing Capabilities

StarPound CORE™ can easily be configured in a distributed environment to provide failover, redundancy, and scalability. As your business scales, so can we!

Download

To download StarPound CORE™, visit the download center.