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 “hard” parts of BPMN. You make the shapes and lines executable by dragging services and data mappings onto them, and it generates executable BPML (not BPEL today) under the covers. They also have business rules, workflow, BAM, lots of good stuff. Some of the Cordys people I met there said this is Composite Application Framework, not BPM, but the BPMN project leader said, no, this is BPM. I think so too. When they get their messaging straightened out, I think we’ll be hearing more about Cordys in the BPMS space.
I’m with you on the ISE confusion: I heard the term at the Gartner BPM summit earlier this year and don’t understand why we need a new term for this. I blogged about it here.
I’ve checked out Cordys, looks interesting.
Link to my post on ISE didn’t show up in the last comment. It’s here: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/column2/archives/2006/04/gartner_bpm_sum_11.php
links for 2006-05-10…
Bruce Silver’s comments on Cordys BPMN process modelling tool…
Firstly, I would like to say that I’ve not seen the “Cordys BPMN Designer” yet. Obviously, I wouldn’t comment on that yet.
However, I’ve heard the terms “ISE – Integrated Services Environment” and latched onto it initially. It made sense – from the point of view that it merely stressed on the “growing importance” of the “composite applications” / “service orchestration” capabilities of an IDE – Integrated Development Environment. Essentially, treating “services / web services” as first class citizens within an IDE’s world.
But, I do agree with Sandy that we do not another new term for this. “Composite Application Framework” is good enough, and an existing IDE can grow into or enhance its capabilities to become a “Composite Application Framework”.
I woudl caution however, on treating all “Composite Application Frameworks (CAF)” as a BPM solution. I’ll wait until I’ve seen demo of Cordys’ product suite; before I can cast my vote for “Cordys” to be a CAF vs. a BPM solution.
Regards,
Kunal R Shah