For BPM and Web services to work more effectively together, a third emerging technology — service-oriented architecture (SOA) — is important, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. In an SOA, software components and business processes can be exposed as services on the network and can often be reused for different applications and purposes, as well as combined in several ways.

“SOAs are the key” to the use of BPM, Schmelzer said. “When you create an SOA, at some point you have to define your business processes, because you can’t really build an SOA that’s not process-oriented.” Once you’ve defined those processes in an SOA, he said, you can best take advantage of BPM and tie it all together using Web services.

Schmelzer noted that several vendors already use BPM together with Web services in one way or another. In particular, he cited Intalio, FiveSight, Collaxa and a variety of startups, as well as BEA’s WebLogic integrator and IBM’s WebSphere integrator.

Schmelzer said that although he has seen some adoption of the two, the combination is still in its early phase. But that, he said, is because “SOA adoption is nascent, and companies are still trying to figure out SOAs.”

But once enterprises get serious about SOAs, which he sees happening over the next few years, the BPM-Web services combination will be increasingly important because “when you make the transition to an SOA, you absolutely need to define your business processes,” Schmelzer said.

Schmelzer and other analysts said the combination will be an increasingly important part of an enterprises IT architecture in the future.

Read more at: TechTarget