Watch Out for Oracle
September 29th, 2006
This morning I trekked over the hill to Redwood Shores to find out what Oracle is up to in BPM. I came away impressed.
Recall that they did an OEM deal two months ago with IDS Scheer for the ARIS Process Design Platform, the leader in business process analysis tools according to Gartner’s quadrant. At the time I speculated this had more to do with keeping up with SAP in the enterprise apps battle than engaging in the BPMS marketplace, but that’s apparently not entirely true. Yes, the Oracle Apps team is one very important customer for the “Oracle BPM Solution” — 1000 demanding beta users, with Larry’s ear to boot! – but not the only one. Armed with the new Oracle BPA Suite (i.e., ARIS), Oracle is also going after corporate customers in the mainstream BPMS market, Oracle ISVs looking to do something similar to the company’s own Fusion Apps, and system integrators looking to create their own repositories of models representing best practices and solution templates.
The Oracle BPM Solution consists of the BPA Suite plus the SOA Suite. The SOA Suite includes BPEL Designer and engine, Workflow services, Business Rules, BAM, Registry, Repository, ESB, adapters, security, service management… the whole deal. They also seem to be the second SOA vendor (besides BEA) who actually understands that BPM and SOA are not the same thing, with a clear idea of how to put them together.
OK, so far that sounds like a complete, but not especially cool, BPMS offering. Here’s the cool part, and it goes back to the recent BPEL discussion. Remember, a problem with BPEL in BPM has always been keeping the executable design in sync with the business analyst’s model once the developer has taken a whack at it — the notorious roundtripping problem. Oracle has solved that here with the Business Process Outline - a model that sits in between BPA (ARIS) and BPEL, with unambiguous mappings to both, and intelligible to business as well as IT. They described their conception of it last spring in Business Integration Journal, and I blogged about it then. But it’s place in the offering was not at all clear back then. Now it is.
The Process Outline is based on metadata shared by BPA and BPEL Designer. Both the process model and BPEL — at least the parts that need to be kept in sync — can be saved as Outline metadata. No matter what the BPEL developer does, Outliner stays in sync. Oracle envisions a new role as the target user of Outline: a “process architect” — more technical than a business analyst but not a programmer, and with a knowledge of the business side. Maybe a useful role for enterprise architects? (No jokes please). The interplay between the BPA user and the architect is viewed as an iterative collaboration, and this seems like an interesting approach to the supposed “business-IT collaboration” promised by SOA. A side benefit: the process architect adds business-friendly metadata to the service registry so that business users can actually use it to discover available implementations, another SOA promise. Why didn’t other vendors think of that?
The Oracle BPM Solution is GA today and in production at several customer sites. New versions supporting Outline will be rolling out in phases over the next several months.
Entry Filed under: BPM
5 Comments Add your own
1. 2252 | October 9th, 2006 at 7:01 am
The question of integration is not just limitted to the enterprise suits. In the long-term the integration has to take place with the societal members that create events which necessatitates an enterprise response.
Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) andBusiness Process Management Systems ( BPMS) are only a sub-set of societal rules and societal processes.
In the global economy, there is a new market for individual to societal integration ITSI) software and individual to societal management (ITSM) software. Are there any entrepreneurs that are willing to look ahead to these opportunities to exploit and get rich by serving those needs?
2. Sandy Kemsley | October 17th, 2006 at 8:44 am
Not surprising: Sinur at Gartner predicted that Oracle was the best contender of the “power vendors” to close the gap to a BPMS solution, back at the .
3. Sandy Kemsley | October 17th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Well, that last comment would have been more effective with the last words, “Gartner BPM summit in March” and the link to my blog posting that talked about it:http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/column2/archives/2006/03/gartner_bpm_sum_9.php
4. Dirk | November 14th, 2006 at 1:46 am
Hello everybody, it seems that ORACLE got to the point when they decided to create the “Business Process Outline” Model. But within this approach there is still a question unanswered: how to avoid a semantic mixture within the business and IT related models? Following the modeling method suggested by ORACLE this is still the case. From our experience this can only be solved if you create loosely coupled models without a direct relationship. A possible solution is described under: http://www.computerwoche.de/heftarchiv/2006/42/1216430/
Comments welcome
Dirk
5. BPMS Watch » Almost&hellip | February 8th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
[...] Oracle’s Devesh Sharma plowed similar turf in his talk. We’ve written about this before, but now they’re almost ready to ship the product. Oracle’s BPA Suite is ARIS plus some Oracle SOA extensions that flesh out the mapping to the executable BPEL process - human tasks, business rules, stuff that BPEL leaves out. The thing they used to call Outliner is now called Oracle Business Process Blueprint. From what I could see in the demo, it’s really two things: 1) extensions to BPEL to hold info from the process model that standard BPEL doesn’t provide, what Oracle calls “shared metadata”; and 2) a new graphical notation to display/enter that metadata, which is essentially ARIS Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) with the shapes changed to look like BPMN shapes and the overall look similar to Oracle’s BPEL Process Designer. (EPC and BPMN are not all that different semantically, but a little.) Is adding a hybrid notation moving the ball forward? Not sure. I asked Dr Jost if they could envision supporting a future version of BPMN that merged it with EPC. The answer, very polite and diplomatic, was basically no. [...]
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed