and Oracle are among the active players
trying to manage or accelerate business processes. There are also pure-plays
like HandySoft, Intalio and Active Endpoints, hungry to cover the bases
their giant rivals don't.
Who will prosper and who won't is anyone's guess, but there is some
considerable momentum happening in the BPM space.
BPEL or Bust
BPM is like any other programming model in that it is unlikely to see
significant traction in the market without interoperable standards that
vendors can use. That's why Microsoft, IBM, BEA Systems and
others have written a specification that addresses the idea of tying
technologies to processes.
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Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is a language
for specifying business-process behavior based on Web services. Amidst
controversy,
its authors submitted version 1.1 to standards body OASIS,
confident that the spec is advanced enough to use even though it's not officially
part of the standards canon.
"Our vision remains to help customers realize the potential of leveraging
our technologies to improve business processes, such as by moving towards a
service oriented architecture," said John Evdemon, Microsoft architect and
co-chair of the OASIS Web Services BPEL technical committee. "A core theme
of service orientation is that the services replicate the business
capabilities of the company."
OASIS expects to ratify BPEL some time this year. BEA and IBM are hashing out
BPELJ, a Java-based version of the spec.
Some vendors believe BPEL 1.1 is as ripe for use as it's going to get, going
so far as to build or acquire technology based on it. For example, IBM
recently cast aside
its proprietary business process modeling technology in favor of BPEL.
Rob Cheng, product marketing director of Oracle's application server and tools division, said
BPEL and BPM can flourish now that core Web services components SOAP
(define), WSDL (define) and UDDI (define) are in place.
"BPEL has not fallen out the end of the OASIS process, but it's essentially a
finished standard," Cheng said. "Web services just gave you ways to connect
things in a point-to-point fashion. BPEL is the Java of SOA because it gives
you a portable, interoperable layer for business process definition."
That's part of the reason why Oracle acquired
standalone BPM provider Collaxa and incorporated its BPEL Server into its
own product suite, renaming it the Oracle BPEL Process Manager.
The match appears to be a perfect fit. Like Oracle, Collaxa's software was
designed to run on any J2EE (define) server. Moreover, former Collaxa
CEO Edwin Khodabakchian and current Oracle vice president said it was
important that Collaxa team with a company that had both a strong
application server and database server on which to rest the BPEL Server.
Start Your Endpoints
BPM up-start Active Endpoints doesn't enjoy the luxury Oracle does of having a
lot of cash to spend. Nor has it been, like Collaxa, on the market to get
picked up by a larger company. That's just fine with CEO Fred Holahan.
Holahan, a veteran of acquired companies like GemLogic and SilverStream,
likes the idea of just starting out in the market. Active Endpoints is only
a year and a half or so old, but it recently made noise by concurrently
releasing its Active WebFlow software engine and open-sourcing
it under the GPL (define).
"There is a rising tide in the marketplace around BPEL," Holahan said. "The
BPEL 1.1 spec is good. It's very functional and [OASIS BPEL technical committee members]
understand where the deltas will be. There have been a lot of competing
specs around process management, but when IBM and Microsoft get behind a
spec, you can be pretty sure it will be a winner."
Holahan is talking about Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) and the
Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI), neither of which have the
traction or support BPEL does. By open-sourcing its BPEL software,
Active Endpoints believes it can stand out in a crowded market. Some analysts agree.
David Kelly, founder of Upside Research, a firm dedicated to studying BPM,
said Active Endpoints will likely raise awareness of BPEL by putting its
code under the GPL.
"To really make this an important development, though, ActiveBPEL will need
to generate broader industry support through additional partnerships or
contributors," Kelly said.
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