Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » TAG: BPM

February 20, 2008 | Comments: (0)

BPM growth, challenges cited

TAGS: BPM

Business process management (BPM) is one of the fastest-growing software markets but faces organizational challenges, according to a BEA Systems study on the BPM market.

Completed January 25 and released this week, BEA's "The 2008 State of the BPM Market White Paper" drew on more than 100 analyst reports, articles and customer surveys, the company said in an executive summary of the report.

The market is estimated to grow from $500 million in 2006 to $6 billion in 2011, a more than tenfold increase. Respondents, however, cited organizational challenges to deployment as outweighing technical challenges. Organizational issues included internal politics, change management, a dearth of skilled business analysts and lack of organizational alignment.

BPM has seen rapid growth in recent years because it brings business analysts and technologists together with shared tools and strategies. Successful BPM deployments view continuous process improvement as imperative, BEA said. BPM is increasingly being used to manage processes spanning multiple packaged applications.

BEA reported that a survey of its AquaLogic middleware customers in November 2007 found that 68 percent of respondents connect BPM and SOA.

Market consolidation was noted, with the nearly 150 vendors in the BPM space in 2006 being reduced to just 25 in 2007.

Leading BPM products support collaborative and social process activities that today are lost in email, documents and hallway discussions, BEA said.

Posted by Paul Krill on February 20, 2008 06:41 AM

June 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)

BPEL4People humanizes SOA

TAGS: BPM

The gap between BPM (business process management) and SOA just narrowed a bit today with the joint announcement of a new Web services specification, BPEL4People. Several years in the making, the specification has a lineup of all-stars promoting it, including Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle, and SAP. Possibly the silliest-named spec since TWAIN (technology without an interesting name), the new standard augments WS-BPEL (Web services business process execution language) with human workflow capabilities.

That's good news, because plain old WS-BPEL, even in its recent 2.0 iteration, is much better as an orchestration language for creating composite applications than it was for developing workflow apps. Not that developers weren't doing interesting stuff with WS-BPEL by itself; some, including Annrai O'Toole of CapeClear, see WS-BPEL as a model for the next generation of programming languages, as enterprise developers focus more and more on creating process-oriented applications that execute long-running transactions across multiple platforms.

But people have a way of inserting themselves in long, complicated processes, and BPEL4People gives developers new ways of modeling behavior so apps don't break when someone takes a vacation. Part of the BPEL4People spec is Web Services Human Task, which actually provides a means to define human behavior as activities (not all human behavior, we hope). Those activiies will be consumable by BPEL apps and, according to the spec's authors, other apps as well.

Presumably, BPM offerings from the participating vendors (and others) will support BPEL4People, so that process models developed in BPM products will be more than pretty pictures developers use as a guide for building apps -- they may actually connect to services in an SOA, shortening development cycles considerably. But all this will take awhile. BPEL4People's authors plan to submit the spec to OASIS in the "near future," so years may elapse before the fully blessed spec makes it into commercial products.

Posted by Eric Knorr on June 25, 2007 11:31 AM

February 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Corticon links business rules, apps

TAGS: BPM

Corticon on Monday plans to announce Corticon Business Rules Foundation, which enables embedding of business rules management capabilities within enterprise applications.

Business Rules Foundation features a library of model-driven business rules management system functions delivered as "headless" services that can be exposed in any form within any application, Corticon said. Through an SDK being released on Monday, developers can build decision automation capabilities into software. The SDK features APIs, Java materials, design documents, JUnit tests and prototype client code.

Business rules describe the logic of how decisions are made, such as approval of a claim or what price or product to offer a customer, said David Straus, senior vice president of marketing at Corticon. But development of business rules has not been synchronized with development of the application itself.

"Business rules management systems today typically provide a mechanism to describe logic associated with business decisions, but typically they do that all externally from the application," said Straus.

"More and more what we've heard is [Corticon business partners] really want to make business rules a very native part of what they do for a living," Straus said.

Corticon's product embeds its business rules software into other applications and can be used by corporate developers, ISVs or value-added resellers.

The Foundation product is the first release in the Corticon 5 business rules management system. Future Corticon products will be built around Foundation, the company said.

Posted by Paul Krill on February 26, 2007 06:28 AM

November 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Second beta release of BizTalk Server 2006 is set

TAGS: BPM

Microsoft on Tuesday released beta 2 of its BizTalk Server 2006 business integration software.

The new beta, which follows a first beta that was released in August, was described by a Microsoft representative as being more developed than the original beta. A Community Technology Preview, which is a preview version that does not have a designated Microsoft support team like a beta release, was made available on November 7.

The general release of the product is due in the first half of 2006. BizTalk Server 2006 is set to feature increased business activity monitoring and will have 26 application and technology adapters bundled in with the Enterprise and Standard editions of the product.

Registered users of BizTalk Server can access the new beta on Microsoft's BetaPlace Web site.

Posted by Paul Krill on November 22, 2005 11:29 AM

November 18, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Managing the human side of BPM

TAGS: BPM

You can't have a process without people, right? Calendaring software vendor Meeting Maker believes that the next generation of BPM will be squarely focused on the role people play in process management.

To that end, Meeting Maker this week acquired U.K.-based PeopleCube, which makes an application that focuses on the human role in BPM. In addition, Meeting Maker is changing its name to PeopleCube and is calling this new linkage between processes and people HPM (Human Process Management).

The concept of HPM isn't new. IBM, SAP, and others, for example, right now are hammering out a specification to extend the Web Services Business Process Execution Language to address the role of people in business processes. Cutely dubbed BPEL4People, the technology is still in development.

The new PeopleCube will continue to develop and support the existing Meeting Maker calendaring and scheduling software line of products. The company also is planning to combine BPM with scheduling and calendaring technologies in an effort to gain more visibility into the people who implement and manage processes, according to PeopleCube officials.

PeopleCube's BPM offering, called ProcessCube, is an on-demand application based on Microsoft .Net. It includes an embedded BizTalk Server 2004 framework and a SharePoint Portal Server. Features of ProcessCube's BPM app include information about people's availability and skill sets, real-time analytics, and dashboards.

Posted by Cathleen Moore on November 18, 2005 05:03 PM