BPMS Watch

BPEL Bashing Redux: Seeking a Middle Ground

Human-centric BPMers’ lack of love for BPEL is today taken for granted, but who knew there were BPEL-haters out there in the SOA world as well?  After taking a look at the BPEL 2.0 spec, Dave Linthicum tries to reignite the bashing, based mostly on the facts that 1) processes still aren’t portable and 2) BPEL 2.0 is not backward-compatible with BPEL 1.1.  Active Endpoints’ Fred Holahan counters with a spirited defense of BPEL. He says yes, BPEL is not 100% runtime-portable, but it is “knowledge-portable” — I guess sort of a process modeling language for programmers?

While I don’t think of myself as a BPEL-lover, I actually come down more on Fred’s side here than Daves’s.  And I’ve moved to a more nuanced view that might provide a middle ground.

In his rebuttal to Fred, Dave says:

What’s most frustrating about the issues here is that orchestration is indeed a core feature of SOA…the configuration component that makes orchestration that part of the architecture providing agility….  Orchestration, at least the notion, is a necessity if you are building a SOA. It’s the layer that creates business solutions from the vast array of services and information flows found in new and existing systems. Orchestration is a godlike control mechanism that’s able to put our SOA to work, as well as provide a point of control. Orchestration layers allow you to change the way your business functions, as needed, to define or redefine any business process on-the-fly. This provides the business with the flexibility and agility needed, and the core value of SOA.  The notion that portability or interoperability was never a promise of BPEL 1.1 does not jive with what has been said and written by the BPEL vendors, analysts, and bloggers….

I, too, was shocked when John Evdemon announced at Think Tank that portability was never a goal of BPEL, and I agree with Dave that hyping process portability was a big factor in getting BPEL’s “coalition of the willing” on board in the early days.  So his dismay on this point is justified.

But in my view, the basic fallacy of Dave’s argument relates to the difference between SOA and BPM.  Yes, orchestration is important to SOA — to create coarse-grained business services out of fine-grained services distributed over the ESB.  And orchestration is also important to BPM — to create end-to-end business processes by orchestrating business services and human tasks.  But BPM is not SOA, and business services are not what BPM means by business processes. 

BPEL is really good for orchestrating business services out of fine-grained APIs — how SOA uses orchestration.  It’s less good — although it can do it — for orchestrating end-to-end business processes.  I think, in the end, this is how it’s going to play out in the marketplace as well: BPEL (or equivalent) within the SOA stack, and a separate process engine in the BPMS.  The BPM pureplays, along with BEA and Tibco, are taking this approach, while IBM, Oracle, and SAP are still on the BPEL-or-bust path to BPM.

If you look at why BPEL 1.1 isn’t portable for BPM, it comes down to three basic limitations in the language: no support for human tasks, no support for subprocesses, and pitiful data manipulation.  BPEL 2.0 mostly fixes the data manipulation part, but not human tasks and subprocesses.  So how can you use an orchestration language without support for human tasks and subprocesses?  For creating business services!  You get more than Fred’s “knowledge-portability.”  You get actual runtime portability, and a choice of engines at a commodity price.  So it has real value there.

For BPM, I think the portability layer moves to BPMN, probably in some successor version that eliminates the constructs that can’t be mapped unambiguously to an execution language.  If and when that happens, you may be able to execute a BPMN model on your choice of, say, Lombardi, BEA, or IBM engines, even though the execution languages are different.

7 comments September 26th, 2006

BPMS Watch Is Six Months Old

Today is the half-year anniversary of BPMS Watch, time to reflect on how it’s gone, and where to go next.

Ismael invited me to guest blog on IT|Redux at the beginning of the year, and after doing that for a couple months I had the urge to try it on my own.  Unlike Ismael, Sandy, or other better-known BPM bloggers, I cover BPM only.  That limits the audience, but I guess it’s the piece I know.  Bloggers are always checking their stats, and I’m no exception.  Here are my results after 6 months.

Feedburner reports subscribers to the feed are around 240, and still growing linearly at around 40 per month. That’s pretty good (I think).  Blogger lore says that it’s better to cultivate a regular readership via the feed than to try to maximize one-off hits on Google.  That’s good, since I have no idea how to do the latter.

AWStats tells me I have around 3000 unique visitors a month, 6000 visits a month, and 24,000 page views a month.  Ismael tells me that’s pretty good as well, especially the daily page views.  Technorati, where the A-list bloggers like to play… not so much.  That site ranks blogs by the number of unique other blogs that link or track back to yours.  I have 149 links from 42 blogs, rank around 66,000.  Unless I expand my coverage into SOA or something, I don’t think I’ll go a lot higher on Technorati.

There are 117 registered users on the site.  I expected more.  You only need to register to comment or download one of my reports.  I don’t get as many comments as I hoped.  I still want to work on that.

The site is now syndicated on FindTechBlogs, part of KnowledgeStorm, an information aggregator.  A number of other media companies have approached me about a similar thing, but so far only this one has pulled the trigger.  I think I will have to broaden the message a bit to appeal to the wider market, and I’m thinking about how to do that.

So far I’ve aimed at thought leadership, mostly among readers who are pretty deep into BPM already — a lot of vendors, consultants, and IT people who “get” BPM.  I think BPMS Watch has done a good job of surfacing issues around “BPM 2.0″, BPMN, what business analysts can or cannot do, the relationship of BPM and business rules, BPM and SOA, and other things that don’t get a lot of serious coverage elsewhere.  I had expected to write a lot more about specific BPMS offerings, and I’m going to do that more in the next 6 months.

As I get into the BPMN training business, I am going to be dealing a lot more with BPM newbies and less technical types, and I need to create more reference material for them on the site as well.  It might have to be another site, but the best thing about Wordpress (and I assume other blogging software) is how easy it is to maintain the site, so I’d like to find a way to reformat BPMS Watch to look a bit more like a website that includes a blog, rather than just a blog.  Any Wordpress mavens out there who can point me in the right direction, please drop me a line.

The bottom line, though, is that blogging has been absolutely great as a marketing vehicle.  It provides reach, visibility, direct engagement with the BPM community… and it’s free for both the blogger and the audience.  I am totally swamped with paying work, much of that generated from blogging.  (Yes, blogging is in a way self-limiting.)  So I am in total agreement with Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady and other so-called “open source” industry analysts… the traditional Gartner/Forrester subscription model is getting harder to sustain every year.  If I am ever able to get a vendor to pay me $50K to put a dot in a box, I’ll know the tide has finally turned.

3 comments September 26th, 2006