“BPM traditionally has been separate from composite applications and the concept of service orchestration because it has traditionally been a modeling or design-time application,” said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink LLC. “But runtime process modeling and management necessarily means management of composite services, which means that process-driven SOA tools will necessarily support composite applications that are either an orchestration or choreography of services.”

In addition to tighter integration with modeling, BPM in the context of an SOA is moving toward utilization of a registry/repository for metadata. “Since business processes are represented as compositions of services, registries will increasingly be the place where service compositions and orchestrations are stored and registered,” said ZapThink’s Schmelzer. “Users will be able to query registries to not only find services, but also processes that are compositions of those services. We haven’t seen much activity in this area as of late, but we hope to see more process-driven services with metadata residing in registries soon.”

Going forward, BPM tools need to evolve in the area of runtime, according to ZapThink’s Schmelzer. “Most of today’s BPM tools are design-time or modeling activities. We need the idea of a runtime business process that is in essence an actual representation of the running system.”

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