Collaxa
BPM and Web services: A perfect match?, part 2
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: TechTargetObjectWeb plans open source BPEL server
While far from pervasive, the technology is attracting interest among customers and the release of open source products could help to further its adoption, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Massachusetts. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, BEA Systems Inc. and other large vendors all support some BPEL capabilities in their server software.
“If you want to build a truly distributed business process, i.e. one where you’re not fully in control of all the applications, because they’re spread across more than one company or across different divisions in a company, then you basically need to make sure you have BPEL everywhere,” he said.
Read more at: InfoWorldBPEL: Why Everyone Is Doing It
With this backing, and in less than two years since being unveiled, BPEL has become the de-facto orchestration language standard, bypassing a number of alternative specifications such as BPML and WSCI. Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink says “It’s a foregone conclusion that BPEL is becoming the accepted standard for business process execution. It addresses 80 percent of the need, and people are rallying behind it. BPEL’s a done deal.”
Read more at: Web Services Pipeline (CMP)Oracle Goes SOA with Collaxa Buy
Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst of SOA and Web services research outfit ZapThink, said Oracle’s maneuver is a positive step for a company that had a gaping SOA value proposition, having offered only an SOA developer kit earlier this year. IBM, HP (Quote, Chart), Computer Associates (Quote, Chart) and smaller vendors already sell SOA software products and/or services.
“This is a major deal for Oracle, because it bumps Oracle from an SOA-by-lip-service company to an SOA-in-reality company,” Schmelzer told internetnews.com. “Collaxa has been delivering on real implementations of process-driven SOA for a few years, so there’s no doubt that the addition of this product will add real SOA capabilities to the Oracle line.”
However, Schmelzer said it’s not yet clear how Collaxa technology will fit in with the rest of Oracle’s product lines, noting that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) (define) and customer relationship management (CRM) (define) application lines “could seriously benefit from an SOA re-architecture.
“But there’s no evidence that shows that they will be applying Collaxa in that way,” he continued. “Right now, I think they’re still looking to plug holes in their SOA offering. We’ll have to see if it really achieves that goal.”
Read more at: InternetNewsOracle Sends SOA Message
“They [Oracle] have been talking about Web services and SOAs in that context for a little while and not too many people have been paying attention,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst with ZapThink. “Their JDeveloper product has these new SOA capabilities but it’s primarily for existing Oracle customers, they’re not getting much additional market share. The Collaxa news with the push into BPEL could very well bring Oracle some new attention in the space.”
Read more at: Line56Service Orientation Market Trends
While Web Services have been getting the attention through 2003, in 2004 the IT computing story will be focused squarely on Service Orientation. Offering an evolutionary approach to distributed computing that provides greater business agility while enabling companies to use heterogeneous resources more efficiently, Service Orientation, based on established Web Services standards, is set to fundamentally change many different IT markets as enterprises transition to Service-Oriented Architectures.
In particular, the markets of application security, security appliances, system management, application integration, data integration, and business process management are six key markets that will become transformed as vendors in those markets Service-enable their products. Furthermore, there is a window of opportunity for new entrants in each of these markets to build Service-oriented offerings. Those windows will soon close, however, as the established, incumbent vendors in each space consolidate their respective markets.
These consolidation trends will continue through the rest of the decade, as large vendors round out their suites of software that support Service Orientation, resulting in a combined market consisting of vendors offering a full-function SOA Implementation Framework. These frameworks will offer enterprises all the functionality they need to build, run, and manage SOAs. The market for SOA Implementation Frameworks is still nascent as of 2004, but will dominate the distributed computing arena by 2010.
With age comes WSDM
Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst with Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink LLC, said that Unicenter WSDM allows enterprises to monitor of the quality of service (QoS) of their Web services automatically. If a predetermined threshold of service performance is exceeded, alerts are generated.
Read more at: TechTargetService-Oriented Process
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Service-Oriented Process to Cannibalize Integrators
As Web services support for business processes matures, companies may be able to throw out expensive and complicated integration systems through a “Service-Oriented Process” approach, according to a new report by XML research firm ZapThink.
“A process is a set of activities that are linked together into a logical flow that meets business requirements,” Ronald Schmelzer, ZapThink co-founder and senior analyst, told internetnews.com.
Service-Oriented Process
Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.
However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.
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