I think I know quite a bit about BPM, and while I can't say the same about SOA yet, I'm trying hard to learn. Still, I already know enough to say that when a BPMS vendor talks about how his product is based on SOA, he's not talking about the same SOA that the real SOA guys are selling. Including things like loose coupling, supposedly a foundational SOA concept. Nobody talks about it, it blows my mind! And 99.9% of what is written about the intersection of BPM and SOA is either irrelevant or plain incorrect.
So out of the blue I stumble on a new blog from Jesper Joergensen, whom I know as the BEA Aqualogic BPM marketing guy, that just nails it... in a way that all those so-called SOA thought leaders have never been able to do.
You may recall my dinner bet with Ismael last month. He bet I couldn't find 3 BPM implementations that met the following criteria:
- Complex process (e.g., "more than 100 steps")
- Integration with transactional systems through WSDL
- Human workflow through web-based interfaces
- Modeling and skeleton design done by process analysts using BPMN
- Implementation done by IT people without writing code
- No vendor support through executable design and deployment. [He doesn?t say into production, just deployment.]
The BPMN part kind of narrows down the field, but I was pretty sure Lombardi, Cordys, BEA, and Savvion would be able to provide me 3 at least! I haven't heard back yet from BEA and Savvion, but Lombardi and Cordys have provided 4, which I present below. Let's see Ismael try to wriggle out of this one!!
Forrester's Ken Vollmer takes issue with my inference that a BPMS truly layered on SOA must include an ESB in order to achieve the "loose coupling" promise. He writes: I guess the one point I would argue with you is that you seem to equate SOA with ESB?s and that is not a good way to think about it. SOA existed way before ESB?s in the form of CORBA and DCOM technology.
If, like me, you're still trying to work out how ESB fits in BPMS (or not), or even what the heck it is, you can look at the new Forrester Wave, courtesy of Cape Clear, the nominal winner. Here is the chart posted on their site, and you can download the whole report by registering with Cape Clear.
A frenzy of recent blogger activity around the question of whether the business people who do "modeling" can really build executable processes, by analogy with the spreadsheet. Keith Swenson says absolutely, David Ogren and Jesper Joergensen of BEA echo right on, and Phil Ayres is a lonely voice of dissent. I come down squarely on the Keith/David/Jesper side. A key point -- that with the right tool, business folks can do things we used to consign to programmers -- is accepted at some level by everyone.
Assaf Arkin guest-posts an impassioned love-hate note to BPMN on IT|Redux. I admit I only understood about half of it, and I think you'd need to have stayed awake through many a BPEL TC conference call to get most of the references. His first core assumption - that BPMN's deeper purpose is to provide process design portability, not just a drawing - is one I agree with (e.g. here and here and also here).
Oracle's Devesh Sharma has corrected my speculation yesterday that the ARIS deal is mostly focused on the dogfight between Oracle Fusion Apps and SAP/NetWeaver. That's one motivation, for sure, but Oracle plans to impact the mainstream BPMS market with the integration of ARIS and Fusion middleware (including BPEL Process Manager and Designer) in an offering intended to bridge the gap between business and IT. A key innovation, he says, is a unique integration concept based on metadata shared between ARIS (BPMN/EPC) and the SOA Suite (BPEL, workflow, rules, and BAM).
I've just finished up 4 new reports in my 2006 BPMS Report series: Lombardi TeamWorks, BEA AquaLogic BPM, EMC Documentum Process Suite, and Cordys Composite Application Framework. They should be going up on the BPM Institute website next week when the webmaster returns from vacation. The BEA report replaces Fuego; the others are new, bringing the total to 10, plus an overview report that explains the common evaluation framework and report format.
Unlike Sandy, I'm not "totally speechless," but on balance pretty surprised by today's announcement that IBM is buying FileNet for $1.6 Billion in cash. It's really about enterprise content management, but there are BPM implications. The ECM vendor landscape has been consolidating for several years now. There used to be 3 top-tier vendors -- IBM, FileNet, and EMC -- so now there are just 2. Usually M&A in the ECM space is about filling in a missing slot in the portfolio, like records management, imaging, media asset management, rights management...
This is different. IBM and FileNet both got started in CM via document imaging back in the 80s, and "fixed content" is still the strongest component of their respective portfolios, although FileNet tends to emphasize production imaging and workflow, while IBM emphasizes database and search architecture. EMC, the other competitor, has ramped up its own imaging and production workflow capabilities in the past year with considerable success (see my 2006 BPMS Report on EMC Documentum Process Suite when it goes up next week), so perhaps IBM is feeling the heat from that. Or beyond that, seeing the next generation of content management competition coming from database/infrastructure providers like Oracle and Microsoft, IBM is just bulking up.
Despite the inclusion of content management functionality in Gartner's checklist of BPMS must-include components, most BPMS vendors cannot even spell ECM. The few that can -- EMC Documentum, FileNet, Global 360, Pega, IBM -- generally had an ECM business long before they got into BPM. I've been thinking about it more lately as I finish up my report on EMC's Documentum Process Suite for the 2006 BPMS Report. And I see bits of it popping up lately in a variety of contexts:
- The Gilbane Group, normally the smartest guys in the room when it comes to ECM analysis, dipped their toe into the topic this week -- not much more than admonishment to BPMS vendors to make their tools easy to use or some such profundity... but at least they're beginning to talk about the intersection.
- Pega's BPM VP Setrag Khoshafian, who wrote about the intersection in edoc, a magazine for ECM users, is promising some snazzy new ECM functionality in PegaRules Process Commander for October's PegaWorld.
- Blogger Phil Ayres has latched on big-time to BPM's need for ad hoc team collaboration, but was until recently unaware that it's the ECM vendors with a BPMS -- EMC, FileNet, G360 -- that actually provide it today. Now he's all over it.
I've written about this topic a lot in reports and white papers, generally in the context of the how these products put ECM and BPM together and the business value, but I haven't blogged about it yet. I think that's because my view of it is starting to change.