More on BEA-Fuego
March 15th, 2006
[Originally posted on IT|Redux]
In his new blog on ebizq, David Ogren of Fuego offers a spirited rebuttal to my charge (and that of others, like Sandy Kemsley) that, whatever its merits in filling out the BPMS magic quadrant checklist, acquiring Fuego was a strange way for BEA — one of BPEL’s initial sponsors — to go about it. While admitting that he (like the rest of the Fuego guys I’ve met) probably falls into the category of “BPEL-haters,” he says that the Fuego engine in fact executes BPEL in addition to its native XPDL-based language. My impression had been that FuegoBPM could import BPEL but immediately converted it for editing into Fuego-native, i.e., a one-way trip… once out of the tube that toothpaste was never going back in. But I could be wrong.
Still, I find it odd that the core of Aqualogic — as I understand it, BEA’s strategic standards-based SOA platform — should be XPDL, or workflow-based, rather than BPEL, supposedly the SOA orchestration standard. And not only that, BEA already has a BPEL engine in WebLogic Integration.
David makes another interesting point in his post, that BPEL vendors like IBM and Oracle are not considered by Forrester to be “strong players in human focused BPM.” Probably Forrester puts them in another bucket entirely, but let’s just stipulate that those companies’ major interest in BPEL is business integration not workflow. So with AquaLogic, is BEA trying to compete with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, or with Savvion, Lombardi, and FileNet?
As I’ve said before, BPEL has serious “issues” with trying to make human tasks portable across engines, and most BPEL vendors are still figuring out stuff workflow vendors have known since 1990. So if human-centric processes are your organization’s immediate focus, workflow-style BPMSs may be a better way to go. But I would not have thought an organization like that to be in BEA’s SOA crosshairs.
Now that he’s been at BEA for a few days now, I’m hoping that David will chime in with his version of the AquaLogic BPM story — not so much why BEA bought Fuego, that’s water under the bridge — but how BEA views BPM within its overall SOA context and how AquaLogic BPM relates to other BEA components.
Entry Filed under: BPM
3 Comments Add your own
1. Shane Pearson | March 17th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
[posted by Shane Pearson on IT|Redux 3/17/06]
There are several items that I will point out that help illustrate why BEA chose to acquire Fuego, a best of breed pure-play BPM company. First, it had to do with adding a thriving business that brings high quality people, products and technology to BEA, which expands our portfolio of technologies in the BPM space. Second, I would point people to the FAQ on our website that answers many of the questions brought up in the column.
BEA is a supporter of BPEL; active in the community and will continue to be active in this standard. BPEL 1.1 is supported natively in the AquaLogic BPM product (Formerly FuegoBPM), and our existing integration product provides import/export support for BPEL. In addition, BEA will be implementing BPEL 2.0 support once the specification is finalized.
However, system-centric processes are just one part of the answer to provide an overall set of capabilities to customers who have requirements for business processes that can include people, applications and systems, and at times be very people or document centric. This is where additional standards for modeling and process execution can compliment or extend BPEL to provide customers flexibility to meet all their business requirements. This includes proposals like BPEL4People, and existing standards like BPMN, UML and XPDL.
So, yes BEA wants to offer a comprehensive portfolio of products that can be used to solve customer requirements for system-centric processes and human-centric processes or the federated processes that bring together both aspects. This is where Fuego fits, and because of the product capabilities it interoperates today with our existing products and extends BEA’s capaiblies to support human-centric processes.
A February article in InfoWorld, The ABC’s of BPM does a great job of articulating the different segments of the BPM market and current trends.
Cheers,
Shane Pearson
VP, Marketing and Product Management
BEA, Systems Inc
2. bruce | March 25th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
[posted by bruce on IT|Redux]
Shane,
Thanks for responding so quickly on BEA’s behalf, and welcome to the world of BPMS! Whatever snarky comments we BPM analysts might make about the acquisition, I think we all feel heartened and validated by the fact that BEA understands BPMS has to be more than what comes out of the BPEL TC, and believes in it enough to make a significant investment. And now maybe Oracle too? All good news from where I sit.
Thanks as well for pointing folks to my InfoWorld piece. But if you read it closely, it puts BPEL vendors and pureplays like Fuego on opposite sides of a pretty clear industry divide. So if BEA is really trying to bridge that divide and create a new “third way,” you might want to promote that fact more forcefully than its done in your FAQ.
3. Shane Pearson | March 28th, 2006 at 7:29 am
[posted by Shane on IT|Redux]
Bruce,
I am not big on phrases like “third way”, but would say that we are just responding to customers who are seeking vendors that can provide solutions for both the human-centric and system-centric business process requirements that are a real part of their day-to-day business. We believe that with the AquaLogic BPM and WebLogic Integration products, we can offer a full solution across these customers requirements, or work in a heterogeneous environment with other third-party products.
Your article on InfoWorld did a very good job of detailing the current gap between the “two camps”, which generally means that there are a lot of customers not being served. BEA just wants to provide a complete set of capabilities and offerings for the entire BPM market.
Your points about the acquisition FAQ are valid, so we will look into adding more details to that page from the main product line information pages on the bea.com website.
“AquaLogic Business Service Interaction moves beyond the limitations of traditional human workflow and process technology and augments the power and extensibility of system-to-system enterprise application integration software by bridging the two together into a single suite of software used to support the complex, collaborative business processes of today’s heterogeneous enterprise.”
Thanks,
Shane
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