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

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.

 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