Intalio Buys FiveSight Technologies

“This is more evidence of continued consolidation in the SOA/WS [service-oriented architecture/Web services] markets,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC. “There’s an interesting substory here about the lack of significant new startup activity in the space and the movement to consolidation and large-vendor dominance of the space.”

eWEEK.com Special Report: Service-Oriented Architecture

Indeed, said Schmelzer: “One of the interesting things to note is that even though there has been significant activity and dramatic upswing in the investment around service-oriented architecture and Web services, we haven’t seen nearly the amount of startup activity as we have in the past around similar waves of technology innovation. “In many ways, the space is consolidating around the larger vendors, such that much of the innovation is coming from established vendors, or at least being acquired by them. Only a small pocket of startup companies are emerging as companies capable of sustaining long-term viability while the others are getting acquired and consolidated at an increasing pace. Indeed, the market is seeming to favor consolidation and convergence of capabilities over emergence of new companies and best-of-breed approaches.”

Read more at: eWeek

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: TechTarget

BPEL: 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)

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.

ZapNote: FiveSight

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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.

ZapNote: X-Hive

The most valuable attribute of Native XML Data Stores (NXDs) is their ability to store arbitrary and highly variant XML documents. XML-enabled RDBMS systems require explicit mappings to XML documents, and by their very nature are unable to deal with XML documents that have a highly variable structure and take advantage of XML’s extensibility capabilities. X-Hive provides a solution to this problem by presenting a highly scalable NXD system that is capable of supporting a large quantity and volume of XML documents. X-Hive/DB is differentiated itself by its focus on high volume XML data storage requirements, support for advanced XML query and storage specifications, and focused support of its European customer base.