SOA and BPM convergence drives acquisitions

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., also views this week’s acquisition as a move to strengthen the Metastorm presence in enterprise architecture, but is not sure how it will play in the SOA space.

“Metastorm has a strong focus in the BPM and BPA [business process automation] space, but they didn’t really have broad coverage in the EA and BPA/EA overlap area, which explains their acquisition of Proforma,” Bloomberg said. “This acquisition transitions them from being more of a runtime process management and modeling firm to more of process design and analysis firm, and potentially increases their applicability to emerging approaches such as SOA which demands greater understanding of business process and how it relates to composite services. However, neither company has had much of a presence in the SOA space, so it remains to be seen whether the combination will do any better.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Metastorm Merges With Proforma For Modeling

The driving engine for Metastorm Enterprise is the company’s own BPM engine. With it, customers will be able to build a unified business model, said Metastorm CTO Greg Carter.

“[The acquisition] addresses a question or a challenge that we saw in the market in that we wanted to more firmly tie the operational efficiency and execution that you achieved with Metastorm BPM with the strategic goals and methods of with a product like ProVision,” Carter told internetnews.com.

“It allows us to have a much broader reach in an organization.”

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer agreed.

“This brings them more from being a runtime process management and modeling firm to more of process design and analysis, and increases their applicability to emerging approaches such as SOA, which demands greater understanding of business process and how it relates to composite services,” Schmelzer added.

Read more at: InternetNews

Service 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.

Service-Oriented Process

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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: Metastorm

Download File

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.