Looking at BPM as SOA platform

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April 28, 2008

Looking at BPM as SOA platform

In an upcoming ebizQ article to be featured in this BPM section, I dig into a question that has underlay a lot of my research for the last 15 years. Is ERP superior to BPM or is it the other way around? Of course, 15 years ago no one called it BPM; it was workflow. And the term ERP had just metamorphed from MRP II (which completely confused people outside of manufacturing but that's another blog post).

Without giving away the answer to my question before you read the article, let me quote one sentence from the conclusion:

"For BPM to really fit at the top of the stack, it cannot just support workflow or just support integration."

I noticed that Intalio made an interesting announcement last week that addresses the issue. When it looks for partners, Intalio appears to be looking for software functionality that combines its features (which tilt toward integration) with other products that fill similar customer needs, in this case workflow management. The result is a platform on which users can structure many IT requirements. The result, without getting into a buzzword battle, is BPM as service oriented architecture (SOA) platform because the many products that are needed can all best be instantiated as services.

The particular Intalio announcement involved Liferay, Inc., creators of Liferay Portal. Together, Intalio says, the products allow employees to have a common interface to manage their daily workload. The portal enables a single integrated view of the user’s calendar, email, task list and whatever other functions the employee or IT department includes. Intalio also partners with the Mule and WSO2 ESBs, Alfresco ECM, the Drools business rules engine, and the JBoss application server but the arrangement with Liferay looks like the first that deals with the applications (i.e., ERP) layer of the stack.

Where might this trend go from here? Well for example Intalio is one of the many companies that SAP Ventures has invested in (and to be clear, Intalio has investors other than SAP). So maybe we could begin to see some combination of SAP enterprise services with Intalio and other BPM integration products other than NetWeaver. All those Infor functions need to be decomposed over the next 10 years to keep tens of thousands of mid-sized companies humming; they could be made to work with TIBCO BPM or with Metastorm. Microsoft Great Plains modules broken into services to run on.... And so forth. And so forth.

BPM as SOA platform is an idea whose time has come.

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Comments

I absolutely agree. It’s for exactly this reason the 'ESB' is enjoying somewhat of a resurgence. When viewed from the IT domain it appears to offer the missing piece of the jigsaw, but when viewed from the Business domain its quickly understood you need to be able to plug people into the system as a first class artefact (lets face it the 'peopleless' process is a bit like the paperless office - an ideal, but very difficult to achieve) BPM(s) are designed with people in mind, lets not underestimate what this means, what people do and how they fit into a process is not a trivial matter, its for exactly this reason BPM has evolved.

In the SOA 'blindspot' (the bit between IT and Business) BPM products from the likes of Pegasystems are exactly what is required, alongside other complementary products (which, in all likelihood are already existing in the enterprise) to start to really step towards and deliver the BPM holy trinity of 'Information', 'Integration' and 'Automation'.

Be careful how you tread though, implementing BPM & SOA as competing projects or strategy’s and you actually make life harder!

Posted by: Gavin Morris at April 29, 2008 03:01 AM