Last fall in a column called "BPM and SOA: One Technology, Two Communities" I said that the big middleware vendors pushing the BPEL standard seemed to understand orchestration as a critical piece of the SOA story but had no clue what business process management is all about. The exception was IBM, who made the effort to build solid interconnections between analytical modeling, BPEL-based execution, and process performance management and BAM in their WebSphere BPM suite.
Sure, any vendor selling SOA middleware is going to drop the words "business process management" into every fifth or sixth paragraph in their website and white papers, but the bar is a bit higher than that. Essential features of BPM include business-driven modeling, simulation analysis, and KPI definition, with modeling and executable design tightly linked in the BPMS development environment. In addition, BPM elevates human tasks to a status at least equal to that of web services, and considers things like rule-based task assignment, deadlines and escalation procedures, and even web forms and document handling part of the process design.
The so-called BPMS pureplays always understood this. Now it looks like the other big guys are starting to wake up to buyer interest in BPM as well.
Exhibit A is BEA Systems, who achieved instant entry into the BPMS magic quadrant with the acquisition of Fuego, a leading BPMS pureplay. What was once FuegoBPM has now morphed lock, stock, and metamodel into BEA AquaLogic Business Service Interaction. What’s notable about this is that AquaLogic is BEA's strategic SOA platform, which the company has clearly separated from its "legacy" WebLogic J2EE platform. And lest you scoff at BEA’s efforts in the SOA middleware arena, their AquaLogic Service Bus recently won Network Computing’s Editor’s Choice designation, beating Oracle, Tibco, IBM, Cape Clear, and Sonic.
So here’s a statement from BEA's datasheet that I wasn't expecting to hear from a leading SOA middleware vendor:
Today many enterprises are rolling out SOA and achieving reduced costs of integration and more rapid development cycles. But these initiatives are mostly focused on efficiency and adaptability in IT. It requires a different approach to truly realize the business value of SOA by empowering the line of business to create and easily modify business processes that are seamlessly deployed by IT.
They're talking about BPM!
Exhibit B is webMethods, an SOA pioneer and well-known for integration-heavy high-volume mission-critical orchestration solutions. Less well-known is how they've integrated business-oriented process modeling and process design that looks more like the BPMS pureplays than what integration middleware suppliers typically offer, and how they've woven BAM and performance management into their process designs. They’re beginning to talk about BPM, too.
Exhibit C is IBM, who was the first of the big middleware providers to provide all the pieces of a BPM Suite, but has always been reluctant to call it that. They always called it process integration or process automation or performance management or business innovation and optimization. At the recent Brainstorm BPM/SOA Conference in Chicago, an IBM speaker for the first time called its WebSphere suite a BPMS. They've also recently added features of human-centric processes, like enterprise content management and collaborative dashboards, that go beyond most of the BPMS pureplays.
Waiting in the wings is Oracle. They’ve already assembled a graphical BPEL designer and process engine, advanced human workflow, business rules, and BAM, but Oracle has yet to declare itself a contender in the BPMS market. The missing piece – business-oriented modeling and simulation analysis – is enough to keep Oracle's focus for now on the bottom-up integration solutions that still predominate in SOA projects today. But they've been active in the labs, and they gave us a peek in last month's Business Integration Journal.
The interesting piece is what the authors call a "business flow outline" with additional "metadata" that can be populated by a BPMN model using "well-defined guidelines" and fleshed out in a real BPEL design tool like Oracle BPEL Designer. In Oracle’s terminology, the outline is a skeleton process design created automatically from BPMN. What makes it interesting is that the outline is specifically intended to solve the "round-tripping" problem of traditional model-driven implementation, where tweaks to the implementation design are no longer synchronized with the model.
The product hasn’t been announced and apparently is not due until the end of the year, but judging from the screenshots, the prototype implementation runs in Oracle BPEL Designer using a BPMN-like notation called the Process Analysis palette. Starting from the analyst-defined model, a developer then maps those shapes to BPEL activities that represent the actual implementation, using rules that ensure the mapping is bidirectional. Even after the design is fully fleshed out and executable, it can be represented in the outline view understandable to the business analyst.
In a similar vein, Intalio and Cordys are using BPMN as a service orchestration design tool. The process designer not only shares the same environment as the business analyst, they use a common BPMN notation. While this is not so unusual in the BPMS pureplay arena (e.g., Savvion, Lombardi, Fuego), it hasn’t been done before to my knowledge in a pure BPEL-based BPMS.
What were once two distinct communities are beginning to merge. BPM is becoming the business face of SOA.
Bruce Silver
Bruce Silver (bruce@brsilver.com) is an independent industry analyst covering BPMS technology and the author of the 2006 BPMS Report series on bpminstitute.org. Read the BPMS Watch blog at www.brsilver.com/wordpress.
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