Tibco Business Studio Version 1.1 is a free, business-oriented modeling environment based on the Eclipse platform. Users can model and manage business processes and services such as claims processing or insurance claims. Tibco said the tool is easy to learn and helps close the gap between business users and IT in the management of processes. The Business Studio tool has been available as part of Tibco iProcess Suite since June but Tibco is unbundling it and offering it for free.

"We want to encourage business analysts and process modelers to use this tool," said Jeff Kristic, senior product marketing director at Tibco. The goal is to coax to model processes and then choose to execute those processes in the Tibco iProcess Suite.

Additionally, Tibco is announcing availability of Tibco iProcess Suite version 10.5, the company's BPM software. It features improvements in performance and scaling, and adds business activity monitoring with a new addition to the suite called Tibco iProcess Insight.

Leveraging AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), iProcess Suite enables Tibco General Interface users to customize look and feel, and build custom forms. General Interface is Tibco's rich Internet application toolkit.

Tibco is also launching a community to help business users and analysts with BPM implementations. Forums monitored by Tibco engineers will enable information-sharing among users. Video tutorials also will be a component.