Today Oracle lifted the veil on its plans for BEA. Naturally, Oracle said the acquisition as a whole was not just for market share, but for BEA’s technology, which would all become part of the Fusion middleware platform. There was a lot of material presented, but I’ll focus on the product convergence plan as it relates to BPMS.

To rationalize the product set, Oracle first sorted the BEA product catalog into one of three buckets: 1) strategic, where BEA was considered superior to existing Fusion components or a new capability; 2) continue and converge, where BEA component would be positioned as secondary, maintained but eventually merged into the current Fusion offering; and 3) maintenance, mostly OEM offerings, which it seems Oracle wants to walk away from as soon as they can. The BEA installed base was reassured that all BEA current products would continue to be “supported,” although those that are not “strategic” would not be enhanced.

Oracle JDeveloper continues as the strategic IDE, although Oracle will continue to contribute significantly to Eclipse. In Oracle BPM, JDev is the one that counts. The Oracle and BEA Eclipse pieces will be combined into Oracle Enterprise Eclipse Pack, replacing WebLogic Workbench. All these tools will be free to customers, per Oracle’s current policy.

WebLogic will be the strategic app server, over Oracle’s own, even though the tooling moves over to JDev. One confusing thing is OC4J, which Oracle uses as the container for BPEL processes, has to be ported to the BEA app server. I guess that is not hard to do…

In SOA, AquaLogic ESB trumps Oracle’s own. It will be enhanced with Oracle features like SCA fabric, BAM sensors, and business rules, and will become part of the Oracle SOA Suite. Oracle BPEL Process Manager continues as the strategic process orchestration and human workflow engine. Web services, complex event processing, rules, B2B, and BAM all fall on the Oracle side.

For BPM, Oracle tries to divide the baby. The existing BPA Suite (OEM ARIS) is positioned as the “strategic” modeling tool at the “high end”, but BEA’s AquaLogic BPM (fka Fuego) seems to have found a home as the “agile BPM” tool suitable for implementation by non-IT “domain experts.” I’m not sure that’s how BEA ever positioned ALBPM, but Oracle’s positioning of ALBPM as the agile one (compared to BPA Suite + SOA Suite) is refreshingly honest… perhaps too much so, so we’ll see how long that lasts. Not sure if they have figured out how to do it yet, but the plan seems to be to maintain the ALBPM modeling/design environment - bad news for BPA Suite? - and move the ALBPM runtime over to a single engine that can execute either BPEL or BPMN 2.0, with common auditing and management. Oracle says ALBPM “will be integrated with the BPEL metamodel for round trip design,” and “process documentation” will be available via BPA Suite. How much of that is hobbling ALBPM and how much enhancing BPEL remains to be seen.

All of this means there is finally a product named “Oracle BPM Suite.” It includes:

• Oracle BPM Studio (ALBPM Studio, BPEL Designer)
• Oracle BPEL Process Manager (runtime)
• Oracle Business Rules
• Oracle Business Activity Monitoring
• Restricted use of Oracle WebCenter Suite (for Process Portal)

More confusing to me is the UI side. Oracle ADF is the strategic UI builder. Oracle WebCenter is the strategic portal/collaboration environment, and leads Oracle’s charge into the Enterprise 2.0 space. It takes a wide range of point products, from collaboration to content management, and combines them in an integrated suite architected for “enterprise-class” use.

Oracle WebCenter Services will include a mix of existing OWC and AquaLogic components:

• Oracle WebCenter Framework
• Oracle BPEL Worklist (Human Workflow)
• Oracle UCM Content Adapter (access Content from Stellent)
• Oracle Portlet Bridge & JSR-168 Container
• Oracle Composer (Thin Client Customization)
• Others: Wikis, BLOGS, Tasks, Discussions, Polls, Surveys, ...
• Oracle Ensemble (formerly BEA AL-UI Ensemble)
• Oracle WebCenter Analytics (formerly BEA AL-UI Analytics)
• Oracle WebCenter Adapter - Content Integration from external Content Stores into WebCenter

Oracle WebCenter Suite is a bundled offering combining OWC Services with a number of collaboration and portal tools, several of which come from BEA:

• Oracle WebCenter Spaces (Portal Communities)
• Oracle Content Server (restricted Document Repository)
• Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (restricted use)
• Oracle Presence (Restricted to Max of 50K Users)
• Oracle BPEL PM (Restricted to Community & Content Approvals)
• Oracle WebCenter Interaction (BEA AL-UI Interaction)
• Oracle WebCenter Collaboration (BEA AL-UI Collaboration)
• Oracle WebCenter Sharepoint console (BEA AL-UI Sharepoint Console -ability to access Content from Sharepoint into AL-UI)
• Oracle WebCenter .Net Application Accelerator (BEA AL-UI .Net Application Accelerator)
• Other BEA AL-UI Individual Line Items folded in

Only part of OWC Suite is included in the new BPMS.

Finally, Oracle intends to follow IBM’s lead and continue to offer a separate special-purpose BPM product - fka Stellent - for content-centric workflow, including imaging and document capture, rather than orchestrate those content services using the “real” BPMS (either one of them). I don’t think this strategy works for IBM and I don’t think it’s ideal for Oracle, either.

Having long held the inside track, the BPDM camp has felt little need to advocate publicly for its vision for BPMN 2.0. However, with united opposition from IBM, SAP, and Oracle, EDS’s Fred Cummins, co-chair of the BMI task force in OMG (responsible for BPMN and other BPM standards), has begun something of a public defense. His first post addresses the concern that BPDM is “too complex.” He begins by acknowledging that BPMN and BPDM sprang from different goals:

BPMN focused on defining a graphical notation that was consistent with the way business people think about business processes. BPDM was intended to provide a common modeling representation to resolve differences between existing standards and proprietary languages, independent of the implementation technology.

The admission that BPDM was never conceived as BPMN but a way to map BPMN to other things is something all sides can apparently agree on.

While the success of BPMN’s adoption by such a wide variety of tool vendors has been greatly aided by its light weight - it doesn’t try to do too much - Fred notes that BPDM is not intended to stand alone, but to serve as the process component of a “suite of business modeling languages being developed by OMG,” including SBVR (business rules) and BMM (strategic motivation model). Moreover, the reason for BPDM’s complexity - what Fred calls “robust abstract metamodel” - is that it has to define…

…basic concepts, many of which will occur in other business models, but in different contexts [in order to] establish consistency of concepts between the different modeling languages. Within BPDM these concepts provide a consistent foundation so that the meanings of the concrete elements that occur in different graphical expressions of BPMN will be consistent with each other and will be interpreted in the same way when used in different modeling tools.

I personally doubt this is a winning argument, if adoption by process modeling tools is the measure.

But I have to say that complexity of the metamodel would not rank at the top of my list of complaints about BPDM. More serious is the view that the notation is secondary to the metamodel, and that user-defined semantics are OK as long as the underlying metamodel can describe them. This is the essence, for example, of Antoine Lonjon’s contention that an attached event in BPMN does not necessarily abort an unfinished activity. Non-aborting attached events would be a great idea, I agree, but step one is to define a notation for it and put it into the BPMN spec.

I have no problem with BPDM as an abstract metamodel, but simply renaming it BPMN 2.0 puts at risk the success BPMN has enjoyed to this point (even without an interchange format). But I’m glad Fred is engaging in the public debate.

The most interesting keynote at the Intalio User Conference was by Greg Olson, founder of Coghead, a BPM-in-the-cloud service that uses Intalio as the process engine under the covers. Coghead bills itself as a next-generation platform for situational apps, such as built today on Excel, Access, or FileMaker. Instead of professional developers, Coghead targets independent web developers and power users. The platform is 100% web based, a multi-tenant service hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, with simple subscription-based pricing (free for single user). You can define data, forms, and perform the usual set of database operations, so it’s really easy to build a database app in the cloud.

So where is the BPM part? You can customize an insert, update, or delete by defining it as a process flow, as shown here.

The diagram isn’t full BPMN, but you can have conditional branches, loops, do lookups, set values, send email alerts, or perform custom actions. The flow becomes BPEL under the covers, executed on Coghead’s Intalio engine. Instead of process being the centerpiece, mini-processes are used to replace simple database operations. The entire app is Web 2.0, accessible through Google Gadgets or iframe. It’s pretty cool.

All of the data lives in Coghead, so you probably are asking how to integrate this with your real data sources behind the firewall. Coghead provides a “linked application” feature in which a facade on Coghead communicates with a RESTful API on your app behind the firewall, which I believe is based on the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). Much as we have WSDL-based adapters to business systems today, it is expected that application systems will increasingly offer APP “adapters” for this type of integration, either from the app vendors themselves, middleware providers, or built by individual developers.

Did you know Adobe had a BPMS? Most people don’t, even though with over 5000 customers they could be considered a major player. One reason people don’t know about Adobe and BPM is that the company doesn’t talk about it in the usual way. In fact, it treats the normal catalog of BPMS features and functions, like workflow and integration adapters, as commodities. For example, Adobe includes process modeling and a workflow engine inside every copy of LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, although to get full human task support you need to get the Process Management ES component as well.

Instead, Adobe’s positioning emphasizes user “engagement,” which is Adobe’s code for an effective user interface, since ordinary HTML user interfaces, such as found in most customer-facing web applications and human workflow tasks, cannot - in Adobe’s view - fully meet user needs. Thus while most BPMS vendors make orchestration the centerpiece and UI an afterthought, Adobe takes the reverse approach.

The ace up their sleeve is that the players for Adobe’s rich Internet application formats - PDF and Flash - are already ubiquitous. Do you know of any desktop that doesn’t have them installed? You might say, so what? Lots of products support PDF and Flash. And Adobe would answer, not the way LiveCycle does. LiveCycle provides a wealth of special server-controlled features that lets you use the free Adobe Reader to fill out forms, digitally sign forms and documents, apply security and digital rights management, encode user data into scannable barcodes, and all kinds of other crazy things. And Adobe’s tools let you render XML process data in Ajax web formats (Flex), multimedia Flash, or PDF, and pop back and forth between the formats. While most BPMS vendors are preaching agility and ease of use to Java developers, Adobe is going after the larger population of Flex and Flash web developers and introducing them to BPM.

OK, that part of the story is about a year old, not new. What’s new from Adobe, in the unglamorously named “Update 1″ version of LiveCycle Enterprise Services, is content management. This is an OEM version of Alfresco’s open source ECM offering, tightly integrated with the LiveCycle development environment. Besides the basics of foldering and search, versioning and access control, it provides automatic content classification, retention management, and team collaboration. Integrated with LiveCycle’s BPM, it provides built-in support for content events, where a new or updated document in the repository can trigger a new process or complete a waiting process activity, based on automated policies and rules.

Previously, to get this kind of “active content” behavior, you had to go to EMC Documentum or IBM FileNet… at a considerably higher pricetag. And if you already have Documentum or FileNet, Adobe also has a LiveCycle BPM adapter for those, too. Real ones, documented and supported, not something a PSG guy hacked together one weekend for a customer. So I think Update 1 could make Adobe a player in the content-enabled BPM category.

Adobe tends to lump content management in the “engagement” bag, but I suspect it’s a different market, and at least as big. Any human-centric process has document attachments, and in most BPMSs they are completely unmanaged. They are stored in a filesystem with no metadata other than the process instance, no access control, search, or - most important - retention management. The lifecycle of these attachments is often independent of the process instance, and stretches over a longer period. The ECM world has been successful over the past few years raising awareness of compliance and retention issues, and I have no doubt a similar thing could happen in BPM, but most users don’t want to spend a lot of money on it. Now with LiveCycle ES, they won’t have to.

A lot of speculation about the fate of BPM and other BEA goodies after what Sandy calls “the Borg” has its way with them. Oracle will reveal all in a public webcast on July 1 at 9am PT/noon ET. To the analysts they wrote:

On July 1st at Noon EDT/9:00 am PDT/5:00 pm in London, as part of the “Welcome BEA and Middleware Strategy Briefing” webcast, Charles Phillips and Thomas Kurian will explain how the addition of BEA products to Oracle Fusion Middleware will create a best-in-class combination. Public registration is open here. You can register for yourself and invite your clients to do so too. The webcast will also be available on demand after the event.

Given all the snark to date, I think it’s smart for Oracle to let the people hear it direct from the Borg itself. And my AR friend Avi there promises that, contrary to my speculation, they do know how to spell BPM.

Glad to hear it!

Next week I’m stirring the pot again on one of my favorite topics - BPMN and Business-Empowered Implementation. Not once but twice.

On June 17 I’ll be moderating a panel at the Intalio User Conference in San Francisco. I’m hoping for users who have been-there-done-that with Intalio’s BPMN modeler. What is the business-IT interaction really like? What skills are required? What are the hard parts? The parts that went better than expected? I’m interested to find out myself!

On June 18 I’m doing a webcast on ebizQ: Business-Empowered Process Implementation… Good for Business and IT. Here’s the registration link. It bugs me that some people continue to repeat the old canard about business folks tweaking production apps with no IT involvement. This is a short one that describes what business-empowered implementation - such as possible with BPMN-based BPM Suites - is really all about.

One of BPMN’s most important elements is unfortunately also the most misunderstood. It’s called a pool, a rectangular shape that serves as a container for a process. So in that sense a pool is synonymous with a process, and that’s as basic as you can get. The confusion sets in when you understand that a business process diagram (BPD) - the top-level object in BPMN, describing a single end-to-end business process - frequently contains multiple pools. Usually only one of the pools describes your process; the others typically stand for external participants: requesters of your process, service providers to your process, or possibly sources of unsolicited events that affect your process. Often such external pools are represented as abstract processes, defined only by their interfaces, i.e. their communications with your pool in the form of messages (called message flows in BPMN). They are drawn with no activities inside, just opaque rectangles or “black box” pools.

This is sometimes quite baffling to business users learning BPMN. But you must remember that BPMN originated as a graphical design notation for BPML, a web service orchestration language quite similar to BPEL. In BPEL/BPML, a process is also a service, and in SOA the service requester and service provider are distinct and separate parties. In other words, the requester is not part of the process, but external to it. You might say this is about executable implementation and has nothing to do with process modeling. And I couldn’t really argue with that, except to say that such SOA concepts are deeply baked into BPMN, and if you ignore them you will wind up unable to avoid validation errors in your diagrams. So in my BPMN training, I try to teach this mindset to business users, even if they have no intention of moving to process implementation. Those with no prior experience in process modeling have no trouble with it, but to some experienced practitioners it is a struggle.

One of the first exercises we do in class is a simple time off request process. The diagram above is how a lot of business analysts with prior modeling experience would draw it. The pool is labeled Time Off Request, the name of the process. Lanes representing participants in the process subdivide the pool.

This is not technically incorrect, but I try to teach it a different way, like the diagram below:

Now employee, the requester, is external to the process, not part of it. In a sense this redefines the process as the servicing of a request, and excludes the preparation of the request, which is admittedly an ITish, SOA-conditioned view. The process starts upon receipt of the time off request. If the employee begins to fill out the request, has second thoughts, and never sends it off, no instance of this process is created. To me that makes sense. To some people it does not.

The employee’s own process is opaque, so we show it as a black box pool. As the service provider, we don’t really care what it is. We just want to show how we interact with it, in the form of a request message (time off request) and a choice of response messages.

One of the confusing things to business analysts who find the time to read the BPMN spec is that the spec says pools are used to distinguish process “participants.” But the spec means participants in the SOA sense, i.e. requester or provider, not in the sense of roles within the orchestration, like Manager and HR. Those are depicted as lanes within the internal process pool.

Many experienced practitioners who use process modeling for analysis and process improvement with no thought of automated implementation find my approach annoying, perhaps counter-productive, and would claim that their clients could never understand it. However, I find that business people can understand it easily; it’s the practitioners who may have to adapt their methodology.

Why would they? The answer is that BPMN is an industry standard, supported by a wide variety of inexpensive tools, and provides a common visual language that can be shared by business and IT. Those factors are creating the demand, by business, to adopt that standard, whether it fits their consultant’s pre-existing methodology or not. BPMN offers business the possibility of playing a more active role in defining the to-be process, using a common model shared with IT. But that new role and new common model demands thinking about the process in a new way - when it starts, when it ends, who’s in it and who’s external to it. And that all starts with pools.

CMP’s TechWeb syndicates my blog, and someone posted a question re my recent post about The Future of BPM at BEA/Oracle. When I tried to reply, the CMP site rejected it for sexual innuendo or something. You be the judge.

The comment:

I did not see any speific remarks about Aqualogic in your article and pose this question to you:
Given the current apabilities of Aqualogic and Oracle’s existing ‘positioning’ of its (OEMd) BPA suite, would not Oracle be able to deliver its BPMS offering that way (I think that’s what you are saying) BUT also support the business apps (BPM+SOA) using the same ‘tools’ (thereby eliminating the requirement & assoiated additional EBITDA impact of having to use the OEM ARIS offering)?

My attempted response:

ALBPM stands for AquaLogic BPM, so I believe it was specifically referenced in the post. BPA Suite (ARIS) is at heart a repository for architectural artifacts related to BPM. The role it plays in Oracle’s BPMS, as a BPMN modeling tool that generates BPEL, is a tiny fraction of what you pay for in that offering. If you don’t care about the architectural repository, I am saying yes ALBPM used as a unified modeling/design/runtime for process is simpler than gluing ARIS BPMN to BPEL via a mapping that sort of works. But ARIS has specific features related to Oracle apps that make ditching it hard to do.

Intercession by CMP’s sex police:

Your message has been blocked due to the following words: hard on. Try omitting the word(s) cited, and reposting your message.

No additional comment necessary.

I see my friend Jesper is moving on from BEA, so the reality of the Oracle acquisition is finally sinking in. When I hear people say that Oracle bought BEA for their BPM, I have to laugh. I’m fairly confident the Oracle crew that went after BEA could not even spell BPM. But no doubt the two BPMSs will have to be merged or rationalized somehow into a single primary offering (although IBM/FileNet provides an example of how that can be dragged out for years). I don’t actually know what Oracle’s plans are, and they haven’t solicited my opinion - you can be sure that if they had, I would not be writing about it. But I have thought a bit about what they ought to do.

Since TIBCO-Staffware and BEA-Fuego, both of which seemed crazy to me at the time, I’ve had a change of heart about consolidation in the BPMS business. At the time of those acquisitions, integration middleware vendors had one view of what BPM is - essentially a business wrapper around SOA - and workflow vendors plus the BPM pureplays had different one, focused on improving “work” and optimizing business performance. And it was not clear which vision would prevail. The middleware vendors were certainly bigger companies with more cash and resources, and in the software industry bigger usually wins.

But TIBCO and BEA, confounding my own expectations, did not embed their acquisitions as a human workflow subcomponent underneath their existing integration-oriented suite, but instead made the acquired company the centerpiece of their BPM offering. In fact SOA, the bigger business at both TIBCO and BEA, became the sub-component, with BPM at the top.

And that was smart, smarter than I was at the time for sure, because the energy in the BPM market has proved to be definitely on the human-centric side, with an emphasis on improving human work in the organization and empowering business to play a more direct role in the implementation. The way the acquisitions were handled allowed both TIBCO and BEA to understand that BPM and SOA are not just different brochures for the same product offering, but different things entirely, and require explicit links between them. It’s taken a while to build those links - in fact, they are just rolling out for real this year for the first time in both TIBCO iProcess and BEA ALBPM. In contrast, IBM and Oracle, who continue to embed human workflow as a subcomponent of an overall integration-centric offering, still struggle with the boundary between BPM and SOA.

So what does this say about what should happen now with Oracle-BEA?

First, a couple points about the two existing BPMS offerings. Oracle uses BPMN modeling in an OEM version of IDS Scheer ARIS (extended with some Oracle-specific configuration dialogs for human tasks, business rules, and notifications) to generate skeleton BPEL that is fleshed out in the SOA Suite design tool. There is a simplified BPEL outline called Blueprint intended to serve as a diagram shared by business and IT to eliminate the roundtripping problem, but it’s not as clean as a true BPMN-based design. ALBPM uses a common graphical notation for the process model and the implementation design. In version 6.1, that notation has been made (mostly) BPMN-compliant. I think this is the right way to do it, so on this point score one for ALBPM.

Oracle follows the BPEL paradigm in which the process does not actually perform activities itself but instead invokes services that perform the activities, and those services are defined outside of BPM, e.g. coded in Java and exposed as services in the SOA registry/repository. Or, in the case of human tasks, defined in the BPM environment, but deployed and managed as separate objects independent of the processes that use them. ALBPM follows the more normal BPM pattern in which activity implementations are defined and used within the BPM environment itself. If services are created in SOA and exposed in the registry/repository, ALBPM can bind to those, but it’s not the only way to do it. In a SOA-based production environment, both BPMSs get you to the same place, but it’s easier to do rapid iterative BPM development and deployment the ALBPM way.

So, if Oracle’s goal is to maximize success in the “straight” BPM market, making ALBPM the environment for both modeling (replacing ARIS) and end-to-end implementation makes the most sense, moving SOA Suite (BPEL) down to the SOA layer and replacing the links to AquaLogic SOA components with links to their Oracle Fusion counterparts.

But it’s not at all clear that the straight BPM market is Oracle’s objective. Like SAP, Oracle tends to view BPM primarily as a platform for transforming their enterprise applications from old-style monoliths to composable services. The BPMS developers, I’m sure, would like to make their product a good fit for both the straight BPM market and their own apps business, but that is hard to do. For example, one reason for separating human tasks from BPM is to support the apps business. Also, a reason for hanging on to ARIS, despite the clumsy integration with implementation, is that it provides prebuilt reference models for the apps.

It is possible that Oracle could adopt an IBM-like strategy and keep both threads alive until things sort out, using ALBPM on top of Fusion as the straight BPMS offering, and the current ARIS+SOA Suite to support the apps business. In some ways that’s the path of least resistance, anyway, so I suspect that’s what will happen.

On June 4 at 1pm ET/10am PT, I will be doing a free webcast on BPMInstitute.org entitled “Which BPMS Is Right For You?”, calling attention to my BPMS Report series available through the BPM Institute site, as well as the recent Ratings Report, available also here on BPMS Watch. The BPMS Reports cover 11 leading offerings - Appian, BEA, Cordys, EMC, FlowCentric, Global360, Lombardi, Oracle, Singularity, SoftwareAG, and TIBCO - and the Ratings Report provides a comparative scoring in 3 process types, Production Workflow, Case Management, and Integration-Centric BPM. On the webcast I’ll explain more about the evaluation methodology, the process types, and how to use the data sensibly to create your BPMS short list. Click here to register for the event.

You’re probably saying, what the heck is OCEB? It stands for OMG Certified Expert in BPM, a series of credentials issued by OMG to demonstrate levels of BPM competence based on exams. There are 5 levels - a fundamental level, business intermediate and advanced, and technical intermediate and advanced. It’s not just about BPMN, but pretty wide-ranging across BPM as both a management discipline and a technology. Maybe too wide ranging for my tastes. You can find out more about OCEB here.

The exams and certification are going to cost money (big surprise), but to get the thing off the ground OMG needs beta testers for the Fundamental exam. The beta helps decide which questions to keep and which to discard as too easy, too hard, too stupid, whatever. Beta testers get to take the exam free… well, maybe… and if they pass, they are certified, before the thing even goes out to the general public. Actually here’s what OMG says about the free beta:

OMG will select and accept a limited number of applicants into the OCEB Free Beta Inducement Program. (In addition, a larger number of applicants may be accepted into an OCEB Half-price Beta Inducement Program. Every applicant is automatically considered for both programs.)

Since I was one of those who helped write the test questions, OMG says they will give preferential treatment to my referrals. So here’s how you would sign up. Go to the signup page here and down where it asks, How did you find out about OCEB? check Personal Contact and put in my name. They say that will work… up to a point. We’ll see.

When I began my BPMS Report series a few years back — actually the predecessor reports, called the Manager’s Guide to BPM Software — my thought was that all that BPMS buyers needed to make a rational choice was a walkthrough of process design using the tools, presented in a standard format and terminology. Those reports were 100 pages long, and I soon discovered that few people wanted that long a walk. My current BPMS Report series reports on BPMInstitute.org are 30-40 pages long. That seems to be a much more acceptable length, but after the comparative ratings report came out in April, some vendors told me that nobody wants to read 30-40 pages, either. Buyers just look at the scores.

I suppose such lazy BPMS buyers do exist, but that’s a ridiculous way to “evaluate” software. You still need a way to see exactly what a BPMS does and how it does it. I still like the walkthrough approach, but vendors are reluctant to publish their own online. Products that make solutions quick and easy to build have no better way to demonstrate that than an online walkthrough. That’s why it’s great that BEA’s Jesper Joergensen has published the full lab walkthroughs on AquaLogic BPM 6.1 from the recent BEA Participate event. They’re pdf’s, not ideal for viewing online but handy for downloading and printing out.

I would love to have a space on BPMS Watch where vendors could post such walkthroughs (or links to walkthroughs hosted on their own sites). Flash video, Powerpoint, PDF… it doesn’t matter. Vendors, contact me if this appeals to you. BPMS buyers, don’t be lazy. Check out Jesper’s contribution to marketing through buyer education.

Lombardi’s Jim Rudden posts an admittedly “cranky” piece about software giants like SAP crashing the BPMS party. His beef with those companies, which he calls Stackers, is that they

pursue the promise of BPM half-heartedly. Actually, they have done everything in their power to bury BPM deep in what they view as their real market…

which in the case of SAP and Oracle, he says, is enterprise apps, and in the case of IBM is… well he’s not sure. I would say GBS billable hours. However, if those guys - none of whom can touch Lombardi for speed of development (agility!), business empowerment, and overall elegance in execution - were not succeeding at some level, Jim would surely not be so cranky. But I think he paints the Stackers in BPM with too broad and too black a brush. So let me offer a more nuanced view.

As the nominal trigger of the bashing, SAP’s Project Galaxy takes the lion’s share of abuse, I think unfairly. For one thing, like Lombardi, it has a BPMN engine (and doesn’t try to shoehorn BPMN into BPEL-allowed topologies). Like Lombardi, it starts with a BPMN process model, and IT binds model activities to implementation properties by point-click configuration in Eclipse. It supports collaborative modeling and design, not a standalone modeling tool that must be whacked back in BPEL mode before exporting to the executable design environment. The SAP guys would admit - maybe not publicly - that the Galaxy modeling surface is not as business-friendly as Lombardi today, but it’s just version 1.0, and they are trying to move that way.

Oracle takes a completely different technical approach, taking ARIS’s BPMN tool and adding Oracle extensions for human tasks, business rules, and notifications, all to generate BPEL that runs on the Fusion stack. Those BPEL gymnastics are similar to IBM’s approach in WebSphere. But if IBM, SAP, and Oracle (with BEA) succeed in their BPMN 2.0 proposal, we’ll see BPMN-direct executable design from all of the Stackers in a year or two. Well, maybe not Microsoft…

So it’s more than, as Jim says, getting their BPM pitch down. It’s getting getting their tools down, as well. I call it “learning from Lombardi.” Ironically, I think the Stackers’ engineering guys “get” BPM, that it’s not the same as SOA, more than the sales and marketing guys, who are much slower to move off their IT-centric value propositions.

Jim’s contention that BPM in Stacker companies is secretly a stalking horse for some other business has more merit. There is no doubt, for example, that the applications group - and the installed base it represents - at both SAP and Oracle dwarfs the middleware group building BPM. That is not to say the groups share the same agenda, but in a sense they need each other to succeed. Middleware needs specific hooks to the apps to tap into the installed base, and the apps group needs the middleware to keep IBM out as they turn the application monolith into composable services.

The real reason for Jim to be cranky about the Stackers is that they do have a stack - a SOA stack - that BPM rides on top of. The pureplays - our former term for the non-Stackers - don’t, and as BPM moves to the enterprise, customers increasingly want one. The non-Stackers say, we have a UDDI browser, just layer our BPM on top of any SOA stack. But that is apparently a hard sell.

I will be speaking at BPMInstitute.org’s Business Process Management Conference as well as providing Training at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, VA over June 24-27. I will be presenting at the conference a keynote titled BPMN and Business-Empowered Implementation, as well as instructing my 2-Day Training Course Process Modeling with BPMN .

I recommend you consider attending both conference sessions and training courses to get the most out of the event. As a benefit of my participation, I have secured a limited number of Complimentary 1-Day Guest Passes* (a $695 value) and the best available rates for training, which are available until May 30. See below for details:

• Complimentary 1-Day Conference Package
• $495* to upgrade to a 2-Day Conference Package
• $695 for Individual Training Courses

Enter Priority Code SILVER when requesting a Guest Pass and/or enrolling in Training. You must do this by May 30.

If you have any questions, please call BPMInstitute.org directly at 508-475-0475 x15 between 9am-5pm Eastern.

I look forward to seeing you at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, VA.

I released the BPMS Watch Ratings report last month, available to subscribers on this site and on BPMInstitute.org. Each of the 11 BPM Suites evaluated was scored on the same set of capability categories, based on a weighted list of features/attributes, including “Strength of Execution,” representing a subjective catch-all attribute. Three process types described in the report - production workflow, case management, and integration-centric - apply different weightings to the various capability categories, but use the same score for each category. I have been looking for a way to publish the details of the scoring, and at the same time allow users to apply their own weightings to the features in each capability category, as well as to create custom process types with their own capability category weightings.

I wanted to do it online, not an Excel download, but had no idea how to do that. At a recent conference, Neil Ward-Dutton showed me his solution for his own BPM research - all written in PHP by the man himself in his spare time. (Dude, get a life!) No way I could match that, but I was able to do something respectable using DabbleDB, a hosted database service that is part of Ismael Ghalimi’s “Office 2.0″ suite. Dabble costs about $10/month, and so far the customer service has been great: when I inadvertently trashed my database, they restored it in 10 minutes.

I was pretty happy with the results, which are available here to logged-in subscribers. The custom feature weightings and custom process type weightings allow users to modify values one at a time, but there is no way to enforce a total of 100%. Also, all users are editing the same list of user weightings, so there is the risk that one user will overwrite another’s values. I added a Last Modified field to help a user know if that might be happening, but it just shows the date not the dateTime. So it’s not perfect. Also, I need to work on my Wordpress theme to allow a bit more width to some of the charts. But hey, unlike Gartner, Forrester, or Neil’s own thing, it’s free (for now) to BPMS Watch subscribers. All you have to do is register and log in. If you’re not logged in, the pages will return File Not Found.

Once again, I need to remind readers that the ratings are based on evaluations done from July 2007 to March 2008, so products evaluated last summer may have improved their capabilities considerably since then. I will be starting a new round of evaluations this summer, and will update the ratings as I go along - in a more timely manner this time.

Comments welcome.

Since my recent post, a bit more has dribbled out into the blogosphere about the negotiations over BPMN 2.0, most of it completely off track. But now SAP’s David Frankel, definitely an insider, is shining a welcome light in those dark spaces with his BPMN 2.0 Update.

The biggest difference between the two submissions is in how they define the BPMN 2.0 metamodel. The BPMN-S submission positions the OMG’s Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) as the metamodel for BPMN 2.0. The BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP submission defines a dedicated BPMN 2.0 metamodel, and proposes a mapping between the dedicated metamodel and BPDM.

Here the BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP submission is what my post called Approach 1 or the BPMS approach, and BPMN-S is what my post called Approach 2, or BPDM. David gets right to the key point:

The BPMN-S submission uses BPDM as the metamodel, and uses BPDM’s mapping to BPMN notation.

The BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP submission takes the position that BPDM is not a metamodel of BPMN; rather, it says, BPDM is a metamodel of a new, abstract language for process that, as envisioned by the BPDM RFP, was intended to be mapped to multiple concrete languages. BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP approach is that BPMN, as one of those concrete languages, requires its own metamodel, whose constructs are clearly recognizable as BPMN elements.

But I think he is being polite here. Since custom behaviors can be expressed in BPDM’s new abstract language, BPMN-S takes the position that the notation semantics should be user-definable, referencing for example my “wish list” post on BPMS Watch for non-aborting attached events. BPDM can express this behavior, and that’s a good thing, says BPMN-S. But I don’t think that’s a good thing if others can’t understand the semantics from looking at the diagram, and I believe that is also the philosophy of the IBM-SAP team as well. BPMN-S seems to throw down the glove with statements like this:

BPMN2 provides capabilities… needed for effective functioning of organizations and productive interaction with industry partners. These capabilities cannot be supported by typical language modeling techniques that simply capture pictures in XML with a computation-dependent semantics.

Ouch. But David goes on to say that despite the trash talk, merger negotiations between the two groups have been ongoing since March, in which the goal is a unified submission.

Since my recent post, a bit more has dribbled out into the blogosphere about the negotiations over BPMN 2.0, most of it completely off track. But now SAP’s David Frankel, definitely an insider, is shining a welcome light in those dark spaces with his BPMN 2.0 Update.

The biggest difference between the two submissions is in how they define the BPMN 2.0 metamodel. The BPMN-S submission positions the OMG’s Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) as the metamodel for BPMN 2.0. The BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP submission defines a dedicated BPMN 2.0 metamodel, and proposes a mapping between the dedicated metamodel and BPDM.

Here the BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP submission is what my post called Approach 1 or the BPMS approach, and BPMN-S is what my post called Approach 2, or BPDM. David gets right to the key point:

The BPMN-S submission uses BPDM as the metamodel, and uses BPDM’s mapping to BPMN notation.

The BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP submission takes the position that BPDM is not a metamodel of BPMN; rather, it says, BPDM is a metamodel of a new, abstract language for process that, as envisioned by the BPDM RFP, was intended to be mapped to multiple concrete languages. BEA-IBM-Oracle-SAP approach is that BPMN, as one of those concrete languages, requires its own metamodel, whose constructs are clearly recognizable as BPMN elements.

But I think he is being polite here. Since custom behaviors can be expressed in BPDM’s new abstract language, BPMN-S takes the position that the BPMN should be user-definable, referencing my “wish list” post on BPMS Watch for non-aborting attached events. BPDM can express this behavior, and that’s a good thing, says BPMN-S. But I don’t think that’s a good thing, if you can’t understand the semantics from looking at the diagram, and I believe that is also the philosophy of the IBM-SAP team as well. BPMN-S seems to throw down the glove with statements like this:

BPMN2 provides capabilities… needed for effective functioning of organizations and productive interaction with industry partners. These capabilities cannot be supported by typical language modeling techniques that simply capture pictures in XML with a computation-dependent semantics.

Ouch. But David goes on to say that despite the trash talk, merger negotiations between the two groups have been ongoing since March, in which the goal is a unified submission.

If you want to jump-start your BPMN efforts, I’ll be offering a half-day pre-conference workshop on Process Modeling with BPMN at the upcoming Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Orlando. This Gartner event is the leading independent SOA and application infrastructure conference, and the agenda’s 6 tracks and 70+ sessions cover future trends and latest best practices in application development, application integration, SOA, Web Services and Web2.0, as well as SaaS/Cloud Computing. My workshop is on the afternoon of June 8; the regular conference runs June 9-11.

The BPMN workshop provides an in-depth tutorial on what has become the key BPM standard, used for both analytical modeling and model-driven implementation in BPM Suites ranging from Oracle, SAP, BEA, and SoftwareAG to Lombardi, TIBCO, Savvion, Appian, and Adobe. You’ll learn not only the semantics behind the notation, but patterns and best practices for modeling events and exceptions, flow control, and organizing complex end-to-end models.

There is an additional $495 fee for participating in the workshop, but BPMS Watch has secured a saving of $400 off the standard registration fee for the conference. For complete conference details and to view the agenda visit www.gartner.com/us/aadi-spring. To register and claim your discount call 866-405-2511 and mention priority code: ADISA.

Beyond the workshop, the event is a good opportunity to understand the future of SOA and the web, new application and architecture models, and discuss your specific issues through Gartner 1-1s, roundtables, facilitated working sessions, and online community. Guest keynotes include Nick Carr, Leading Tech and Business Writer on “The Big Switch,” and Andrew Lippman, MIT’s Media Lab Futurist on “IT Architecture futures.”

I’ll be available to meet with you one-on-one as well to discuss how BPMN can help bring business and IT together in your organization.

Hope to see you in Orlando.

If you want to jump-start your BPMN efforts, I’ll be offering a half-day pre-conference workshop on Process Modeling with BPMN at the upcoming Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Orlando. This Gartner event is the leading independent SOA and application infrastructure conference, and the agenda’s 6 tracks and 70+ sessions cover future trends and latest best practices in application development, application integration, SOA, Web Services and Web2.0, as well as SaaS/Cloud Computing. My workshop is on the afternoon of June 8; the regular conference runs June 9-11.

The BPMN workshop provides an in-depth tutorial on what has become the key BPM standard, used for both analytical modeling and model-driven implementation in BPM Suites ranging from Oracle, SAP, BEA, and SoftwareAG to Lombardi, TIBCO, Savvion, Appian, and Adobe. You’ll learn not only the semantics behind the notation, but patterns and best practices for modeling events and exceptions, flow control, and organizing complex end-to-end models.

There is an additional $495 fee for participating in the workshop, but BPMS Watch has secured a saving of $400 off the standard registration fee for the conference. For complete conference details and to view the agenda visit www.gartner.com/us/aadi-spring. To register and claim your discount call 866-405-2511 and mention priority code: ADISA.

Beyond the workshop, the event is a good opportunity to understand the future of SOA and the web, new application and architecture models, and discuss your specific issues through Gartner 1-1s, roundtables, facilitated working sessions, and online community. Guest keynotes include Nick Carr, Leading Tech and Business Writer on “The Big Switch,” and Andrew Lippman, MIT’s Media Lab Futurist on “IT Architecture futures.”

I’ll be available to meet with you one-on-one as well to discuss how BPMN can help bring business and IT together in your organization.

Hope to see you in Orlando.

Surprisingly little information has reached public view concerning BPMN 2.0, now under consideration in OMG. Unlike most standards approval processes, the outcome of this one is not preordained. There are two submissions, quite different, and it could go either way.

Oracle’s Vishal Saxena notes that one reason BPMN 1.x has been so successful is that it “keeps simple things simple” by focusing on abstract business-level modeling, allowing developers flexibility in how to implement the technical details, and argues that BPMN 2.0 “should maintain this flexibility.” In response, IDS Scheer’s Sebastian Stein points out that a problem with BPMN 1.x is that it “only has implicitly defined execution semantics,” and BPMN 2.0 needs to make them explicit. He goes on to neatly summarize the competing proposals:

At the current point there are two different approaches discussed within OMG, how to do that:

1. BPMN 1.1 already contains an implicit definition of the execution semantics, so just make them explicit by writing them down.
2. Use a more abstract meta model with well defined execution semantics like BPDM and map BPMN elements to it.

Approach 1 is a simple solution, because in the end it does not change much for the BPMN user. The implicit execution semantics are just made explicit, but they are not modified. Approach 2 is more complicated, because a second language is added to the stack and new concepts are introduced. Having more and new concepts might contradict BPMN's current strength - simplicity. This will increase the learning curve for BPMN modelling and might hinder a further adoption.

I think this is a fair characterization, but it’s not the whole story. Approach 1 is a joint submission by the large platform/middleware vendors, companies used to having their way in W3C and OASIS. Approach 2 is BPDM, which has been incubating in OMG for a long time, and wedded to OMG fundamentals like MOF and xmi. More significantly, Approach 1 reflects (to me, at least) a BPMS approach to BPM solution development, emphasizing unification of the business-oriented process model with the executable design, while Approach 2 is more aligned to OMG’s programmer-oriented MDA vision, in which models are just a more efficient way to generate code.

It’s a subtle distinction, and not everyone would agree with my characterization. A key element is that in Approach 1, the execution semantics of shapes in the diagram are specified by the standard, while in Approach 2 they can be redefined by the user. That’s what the BPMN Wish List controversy back in March was all about.

As a non-voting guest member of OMG, I am not a party to the contest, but I am not neutral, either. I think a win by Approach 1 would greatly assist BPMS become mainstream and better define the relationship of BPM to SOA. Formal action by OMG on this is not scheduled until August-September.

Surprisingly little information has reached public view concerning BPMN 2.0, now under consideration in OMG. Unlike most standards approval processes, the outcome of this one is not preordained. There are two submissions, quite different, and it could go either way.

Oracle’s Vishal Saxena notes that one reason BPMN 1.x has been so successful is that it “keeps simple things simple” by focusing on abstract business-level modeling, allowing developers flexibility in how to implement the technical details, and argues that BPMN 2.0 “should maintain this flexibility.” In response, IDS Scheer’s Sebastian Stein points out that a problem with BPMN 1.x is that it “only has implicitly defined execution semantics,” and BPMN 2.0 needs to make them explicit. He goes on to neatly summarize the competing proposals:

At the current point there are two different approaches discussed within OMG, how to do that:

1. BPMN 1.1 already contains an implicit definition of the execution semantics, so just make them explicit by writing them down.
2. Use a more abstract meta model with well defined execution semantics like BPDM and map BPMN elements to it.

Approach 1 is a simple solution, because in the end it does not change much for the BPMN user. The implicit execution semantics are just made explicit, but they are not modified. Approach 2 is more complicated, because a second language is added to the stack and new concepts are introduced. Having more and new concepts might contradict BPMN's current strength - simplicity. This will increase the learning curve for BPMN modelling and might hinder a further adoption.

I think this is a fair characterization, but it’s not the whole story. Approach 1 is a joint submission by the large platform/middleware vendors, companies used to having their way in W3C and OASIS. Approach 2 is BPDM, which has been incubating in OMG for a long time, and wedded to OMG fundamentals like MOF and xmi. More significantly, Approach 1 reflects (to me, at least) a BPMS approach to BPM solution development, emphasizing unification of the business-oriented process model with the executable design, while Approach 2 is more aligned to OMG’s programmer-oriented MDA vision, in which models are just a more efficient way to generate code.

It’s a subtle distinction, and not everyone would agree with my characterization. A key element is that in Approach 1, the execution semantics of shapes in the diagram are specified by the standard, while in Approach 2 they can be redefined by the user. That’s what the BPMN Wish List controversy back in March was all about.

As a non-voting guest member of OMG, I am not a party to the contest, but I am not neutral, either. I think a win by Approach 1 would greatly assist BPMS become mainstream and better define the relationship of BPM to SOA. Formal action by OMG on this is not scheduled until August-September.

Regarding TIBCO’s first-ever “analyst summit” at their annual user conference, I’ll leave it to Sandy to record the actual content of the presentations to analysts. I’ll stick to the impressionistic view. Apparently “the analysts” had told TIBCO they wanted to hear executives talk about go-to-market strategy, so we got almost nothing about product and an awful lot about “value propositions.” Are there really analysts who want to spend half a day hearing about value props and selling tactics? Scary. But, having lowered my expectations completely, TIBCO’s “solution showcase” exhibits - open to the hoi polloi after the analyst event ended - actually blew my socks off:

• Spotfire, a business-empowered performance visualization technology, was dazzling. Not BPM-specific, but a perfect fit for BAM. You take a set of instance data, and interactively scatter-plot any metrics against each other, zoom in on a region of interest, filter instances with a slider in real time, and list the instances in the set. All real time, interactive, no code. Totally cool. If they would just put that inside iProcess BAM and get rid of the IDS Scheer analytics, it would make total sense. No they did not announce that.
• iProcess Conductor. Supposedly this has been around for several years, but I missed it completely in the BPMS Reports, and TIBCO never noticed. I call it case management, but it works as well with fully automated straight-through processes, so TIBCO calls it “dynamic BPM.” The idea