[Originally posted on IT|Redux]
BEA?s acquisition of Fuego this week is a welcome validation of the BPMS market, but what a surprising way to go about it! Probably the strangest BPM acquisition since TIBCO spent big bucks on a workflow engine that couldn?t even receive a JMS message.
FuegoBPM appears to have already morphed lock, stock, and barrel into BEA?s AquaLogic BPMS. Not that FuegoBPM isn?t a fine BPMS, but it?s not based on BPEL -- wasn?t BEA a ?founder? of that standard? -- and you could argue it?s not even service orchestration, at least in the way most in the BPMS community understand it. For example, process activities in Fuego are not SOAP
I got a nice note yesterday from Paul Fisher, an IT exec at the FDA, on my BPM 2.0 manifesto. He was struck, in particular, by the line that said: "[BPM's] top-down design contrasts starkly with current SOA initiatives, which are bottom-up and IT-driven, and where the services exposed for composition are determined by IT's notion of enterprise architecture, not by process-centric analysis." He goes on to say, That's exactly what is going on here, and I'm trying to argue with people who are trying to build services simply to be able to say look ma, SOA!
IBM today unleashed a tidal wave of product announcements under the heading "SOA from a Business Centric Perspective." Details on individual offerings are still sketchy. This was mostly shock and awe: Surrender Earthlings, our technology is simply too vast and powerful... And it really is an impressive array of stuff. In addition to enhancements to WebSphere Business Modeler, Monitor, Process Server, and Integration Developer - all the components of the WebSphere BPM suite - IBM is throwing a bunch of new stuff into the mix.
[reprinted from BPMS Watch on bpminstitute.org] Two or three years ago, when I began speaking at BrainStorm BPM conferences, I coined the term "BPM 2.0" to refer to new tools that allowed "process without programming." That technology, featuring integration adapters that could introspect enterprise information systems and turn them magically into ?services? ready for orchestration in a business process, was the beginning of the convergence of SOA and BPM. Looking back now, however, I think a better term might have been BPM 1.
Today Global 360 announced the completion of a $200 Million management buyout led by TA Associates, with participation by Technology Crossover Ventures and JMI Equity. The buyout reaffirms the leadership of the current executive management team, led by Michael Crosno, and is intended to further the company's long-term growth strategy. Global 360 is an interesting organization, with technology that goes back to the earliest prehistory of BPM. Under founder Sonny Oates, G360 - originally called eiStream - was successful at rolling up traditional workflow and imaging companies struggling to make the transition to what we now call BPM.
[Originally posted on IT|Redux]
In his new blog on ebizq, David Ogren of Fuego offers a spirited rebuttal to my charge (and that of others, like Sandy Kemsley) that, whatever its merits in filling out the BPMS magic quadrant checklist, acquiring Fuego was a strange way for BEA ? one of BPEL?s initial sponsors ? to go about it. While admitting that he (like the rest of the Fuego guys I?ve met) probably falls into the category of ?BPEL-haters,? he says that the Fuego engine in fact executes BPEL in addition to its native XPDL-based language. My impression had been that FuegoBPM could import BPEL but immediately converted it for editing into Fuego-native, i.e., a one-way trip? once out of the tube that toothpaste was never going back in. But I could be wrong.
I'm back from the Brainstorm BPM and SOA Conference in Chicago this week, where I spoke on Selecting a BPMS to the BPM crowd and tried to explain BPEL to the SOA crowd. In an event like that my presentations stick out like a sore thumb, as the typical conference attendee is really trying to learn "how to do BPM," which in that context means documenting the as-is process and modeling an better way to do it against the backdrop of a traditionally stovepiped organization.
One cool thing I saw at Brainstorm BPM was a demo by Cordys of their BPMN-based process designer. I hadn't heard of Cordys, which is based in Amsterdam , but they sent me the latest Gartner MQ of the "ISE" market (Gartner's term for SOA management/orchestration platforms -- why do they do this?) where Cordys came out highest in the "completeness of vision" axis. Anyway, they have a really nice BPMN designer, supporting intermediate events and other "
Last week Lombardi Software announced that Cognos, a leader in business intelligence software, had OEM'ed Lombardi TeamWorks for use in a new line of "analytic applications." This action adds a new twist to the already-blurring boundaries between BPM and performance management/analytics that has been going on for a year or two. Performance management is one of the 3 legs of the BPMS stool (the others being analytical modeling and process execution), so it's no accident that BPMS vendors have been poaching on BI turf with features like process analytics, management dashboards, and BAM.
I had an interesting briefing today from Zynium, provider of a tool that maps Visio process diagrams to various BPMS environments, including Fujitsu, Appian, Software AG, and DST. Many BPMS and modeling tool vendors have developed their own Visio import capability, with varying degrees of success, and several of them are talking to Zynium as well. Doing it well is apparently harder than it looks. All these tools work essentially the same way, requiring the user to manually define a mapping between each Visio shape and a corresponding shape or widget in the BPMS modeling or design environment.
