Unlike earlier distributed computing technologies, Web services and XML give the software industry a chance to finally realize the "standardization dream" enjoyed by industries such as transportation and manufacturing, said Iona CTO Eric Newcomer. During his keynote speech at the XML Web Services One conference, Newcomer said that the proliferation of XML-based Web services standards and development -- particularly around application integration -- will enable software "mass assembly" on a wide scale. The era of process manufacturing is close at hand.

Iona CTO touts Web services 'standardization dream' [Source InfoWorld]

Tom Siebel sees an enterprise computing future that's dominated by automated business processes and that's based on best practices and applications delivered as Web services. In the not-so-distant future, applications will write themselves to conform to pre-established business processes, Siebel said.

No Future for individual applications [Source eWeek]

Business Process Management (BPM) technology enables government agencies to dismantle obsolete bureaucratic divisions by cutting the labor- and paper-intensive inefficiency from manual, back-end processes. Faster and auditable processes allow employees to do more in less time, reducing paper use as well as administrative overhead and resources. The BPM layer can manage change, one of government’s most difficult challenges. Organizational impediments such as size and complexity, contradictory policies and directives, and difficulty coordinating across organizational silos all contribute to the challenge of managing change. In fact, many projects fail because of these impediments, and because organizations do not understand the importance of managing change. BPM offers government agencies a compelling solution.

Business Process Management — the Key to Efficient Government [Aberdeen Group]

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]

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?

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

Computer Sciences Corporation has anounced its adoption of Business Process Modelling Language (BPML) 1.0 as a foundation of its e3 enterprise architecture. CSC identified nine major business drivers forcing the types of changes BPM is designed to address. They include consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, divestitures, regulatory compliance, business model shifts, changing customer expectations, industry standardization and business process outsourcing.

CSC adopts BPML as foundation for E3(SM) enterprise architecture [source CSC]

Forrester says "Almost two years after inception, BPMI.org -- now backed by more than 130 members -- has released the first public draft of its Business Process Modeling Language. Our take? Firms should bet on BPML for describing end-to-end business processes."

BPML 1.0: A Step Toward Process Interoperability [source Forrester]

BPM is a hot topic these days – and the financial figures behind BPM show why. This article looks at the business case and ROI of BPM. Barry Murphy, a market analyst with Delphi Group expects "a market explosion" for Business Process Management (BPM) solutions. He notes that over 70% of companies are deploying or evaluating BPM solutions within the next year. "Today we are just scratching the surface", he said. What will become of BPM? Does it have the staying power to endure within the enterprise? Can it provide sufficient value to cross the chasm and achieve mainstream market adoption, or will it gradually disappear into the sunset and be added to the list of higly touted technologies that never met expectations?

The Economic Benefits of BPM [source EAIJournal]

Almost every enterprise has made substantial investments in business applications and databases. Millions of lines of code have been written. One could even argue that almost every important business function is already coded and in production. In an ideal world, all these business functions would be individually packaged and fully interchangeable; building new applications would simply be a matter of putting the functions you need in the proper order. This notion has great appeal. The term "composite application" is gaining momentum in the industry as a way to describe such a program. Put simply, a composite application requires very little new code; instead, it relies on other systems to do most of its work. In effect, it is a composite of many applications, and the majority of its business logic is stored and executed on other enterprise systems.

Integrating Legacy Environments: How Reusable Business Components Accelerate the Process [source ebizq.net and WRQ]

Understanding your organization's processes and process management is critical to running it, especially when it is directly related to the key performance indicators of the business. The penalties of not managing knowledge and business processes correctly can be as minor as losing market share or as major as losing an entire company. That's a lesson the U.K.'s Barings Bank learned in 1995 when a lack of procedural checks on rogue trader Nick Leeson led to the former Barings investment officer losing $1.2 billion of his employer's money in unauthorized trades--and bringing down the entire bank.

Managing Knowledge: The Rise of Enterprise Process Management and Content Management Tools [Source ebizq.net and NimbusPartners]

The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) is the next frontier destined to give companies competitive advantage in managaing their value chain relationships. Large companies currently spend more than 30 percent of their IT budgets integrating their business applications under the banner of enterprise application integration (EAI), trying to get their internal act together for yet another step, business-to-business integration (B2Bi). Why are they going to all this effort and expense? They are tying together fragments of their stovepipe applications to create end-to-end, multi-company business processes—those activities that bring ultimate value to customers. It is indeed the entire value chain, not a single company, that delivers the goods or services. Value chain management is now clearly recognized as the next frontier for gaining new productivity and competitive advantage. If end-to-end business processes are the focus of internal and cross-company integration, why not deal directly with the "business process" instead of "applications?"

Integrated Value Chain [source Internet World]

For years the industry has dreamed of modeling business processes in software and combining them like Tinker Toys. Web services orchestration, the new term for that old idea, becomes more interesting as raw services multiply behind firewalls. But as integration vendors point out, the orchestration layers of the Web services stack aren't yet baked. The standards pioneers -- Microsoft, IBM, and now Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems -- are busy in the kitchen.

Two proposed XML grammars for describing the orchestration of Web services -- Microsoft's XLANG, used by BizTalk, and IBM's WSFL (Web Services Flow Language) -- were widely expected to have merged by now into a joint World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) submission. That hasn't happened. Meanwhile, Sun, BEA, SAP, and Intalio have introduced a third candidate: WSCI (Web Service Choreography Interface). The relationships among these three proposals -- and others, including Intalio's BPML (Business Process Markup Language) and ebXML's BPSS (Business Process Schema Specification) -- are murky.

Orchestrate services [Source Infoworld]

The WSCI consortium publishes key web services orchestration standard based on BPML. "Interoperability of Web services needs to extend beyond basic messaging, and WSCI enables Web services to interact with each other in specified ways to accomplish the needs of complex business processes," said Richard Green, vice president and general manager, Java & XML Technologies, Sun Microsystems. "This is a major step forward for the industry and will provide a key piece of technology to support Sun's Java Web Services software initiatives."

"Web services need to be flexibly combined to drive collaboration," said Karl-Heinz Hess, member of the Extended Management Board of SAP AG. "SAP contributes its long-standing business expertise to WSCI ensuring that comprehensive automated business processes can be adequately described."

"BEA believes that a workflow interface language is a key next step in the evolution of the Web Services architecture," said David Orchard, W3C Lead and W3C Architecture Group member, BEA Systems. "This work is clear indication of BEA's support for community and other efforts in Web Service technology development."

"Intalio is delighted to co-author the WSCI specification with a distinguished group of leading software companies that share the vision of bridging the gap between business process management and Web services. With its strategic participation in WSCI, Intalio builds on its commitment to open standards," said Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio co-founder and chief strategy officer. "Our collective efforts on the WSCI specification will enable customers to more easily and cost-effectively deploy end-to-end processes across value networks. Intalio will leverage the WSCI specification in its strategic product offerings to help customers reduce process design-to-production cost, control total cost of process ownership, and deliver strategic return on process investment."

BEA, Intalio, SAP, Sun publish Web Services Choreography Interface, take web services collaboration to new level

Imagine a world where people speak a language that brilliantly describes the molecular structure of a large object but can't tell you what the object is - or that it's about to fall on you. You've just glimpsed the arcane world of business process applications. Fortunately, an emerging Business Process Management Language (BPML) standard championed by Sterling Commerce is beginning to change all that. "BPML is prosaic enough to describe the process of hosting a dinner party yet sophisticated enough to handle describing how computer system 'A' talks to computer system 'B,'" said Jeanne Baker, director, e-business integration solutions for Sterling Commerce and board member of the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), developer of BPML.

BPML: Launching A New Era In Business Process Management [source SterlingCommerce]

This analyst claims "Workflow technologies are everywhere, having been embedded in a range of development tools, network applications and Web services. Workflow standards are everywhere, too, but they never seem to jump the gap from hopeful press releases to broad adoption. So it's with considerable skepticism that we should greet the recent announcement that the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) and the Business Process Management Institute (BPMI) have agreed to converge their efforts to define XML-based workflow-process definition standards. Potentially, the alliance could bring WfMC's XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) and BPMI's Business Process Markup Language (BPML) under a common standards initiative."

Still no universal workflow [source NetworkWorld]