Thursday, August 29, 2002

BPM is a technology that helps writing complex applications, it is part of the application model as Intalio put it when it founded BPMI.org, it is a component that enables corporations to run and manage the process-oriented business logic of the their applications at a common level as opposed to the current situation where this type of business logic is buried in code in all applications. So how does this application model look like today? How is BPM is positioned in the application model? The current forces when designing new applications are two fold: a) every application must be able to evolve rapidly -this is not so new-, b) most applications cannot be developed in isolation, they must integrate readily with their environment (typically other applications) -this is rather new, as the cost of ownership and the value of the application both strongly depend on how well they integrate with their environment.

The End in Mind and The Infrastructure Battle [source ebpml.org]
One factor that prompted IBM, Microsoft, and BEA to get together in the first place, says analyst Sharyn Leaver of Forrester, was the existence of organizations like BPMI.org and WSCI (which counts SAP, Sun, and BEA as members), which were making inroads into the Web services standards game. "BPMI's language, BPML, was gaining momentum. Also, Microsoft and IBM's separate process standards, XLANG and WSFL, were competing." Leaver says that IBM, Microsoft, and BEA are pushing for standards that could take Web services past the level of internal integration and into full-fledged business process management (BPM) between partners. It's about "using the same terms to represent an event, process, or partner, and interoperating," she explains.

New Web Services and BPM Standards [source line56]
Proponents of the specification BPML (Business Process Modeling Language) came out in support of BPEL4WS, saying the two specifications were so technically similar that they would be a good complement and likely would head toward convergence in the future. "You finally have all the vendors agreeing on a common way, at the model level, to describe business processes," said Ismael Ghalimi, chairman of BPMI.org, which created BPML, and chief strategy officer at Intalio, in San Mateo, Calif.
BPMI position statement can be downloaded from the web site of the BPMI.org.

Steering the course [source Infoworld]

Monday, August 12, 2002

Web services are touted as the new game in town, promising to harvest and harness dynamic just-in-time value opportunities over the Internet. The buzz is to extend, reuse, and redeploy existing technology investments in an effort to capitalize on the wealth of the Internet. These are big ideas and big promises, and like every new thing that crops up in any industry, roads must be paved from the existing infrastructure to the new technology. This Aberdeen Viewpoint articulates how the loosely coupled, self-describing components known as Web services will interact with Business Process Management (BPM) suites, and how these suites will leverage Web services.

Business Process Management - What Do Web Services Have to Do with It?

Friday, August 09, 2002

Businesses need to constantly adapt their processes, yet they are often held back by static IT systems that aren't designed to exploit future opportunities. Business process management (BPM) is a new change management and systems implementation methodology that overcomes this problem. Supporting BPM are new software solutions called business process management systems (BPMS). This report helps software vendors, service organisations and end users determine where the software and service opportunity lies in BPM.

In the current economic climate, business process flexibility is key to organisational survival. But the logic of business process tends to get hard-wired into highly expensive IT systems that are complex and stifle innovation. However, the BPMS is a new kind of software suite that enables organisations to build flexible, responsive systems with speedy integration into existing software infrastructure. Both EAI and workflow vendors are now scrambling to add capabilities to their offerings, while new entrants and service companies are trying to position themselves for what they anticipate to be a lucrative market opportunity. Ovum’s report, Business Process Management: a Systems Solution to Crisis, helps you to understand this technology and what it represents.

Business Process Management: A Systems Solution To Crisis [source Ovum]
Microsoft, IBM, and BEA Systems have pre-announced that they intend to unleash a trio of proposed Web services standards that address several unmet needs of the nascent services-oriented application model, according to sources. With these standards, the companies are looking to solidify workflow and business process execution as well as transaction integrity and coordination. Primary among the new proposals is the awkwardly named BPEL4WS (business process execution language for Web services), which represents the marriage of two rival standards, WSFL (Web services flow language) from IBM and XLang from Microsoft. An executable language, BPEL4WS is designed to ensure that differing business processes can understand each other in a Web services environment. Many industry observers had expected WSFL to subsume XLang as a standard.

Microsoft, IBM, BEA to unleash trio of Web services specs [source Infoworld]
The World Wide Web Consortium has published WSCI as a note.

Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI) 1.0