Yesterday I got a briefing from the BPM folks at Oracle, as part of my BPMS Report series, and I came away surprised at both the completeness and, in many ways, coolness of the offering. A few things stand out (for the rest you’ll have to wait for the report, later this month):
Oracle provides a unique solution to the problems of business-IT interaction and round-tripping. For modeling, Oracle OEMs IDS Scheer ARIS, rebranded Oracle BPA Suite, and has added to it Oracle SOA Extensions that link it to the executable process design and runtime environment, called Oracle SOA Suite. Modelers can use either traditional ARIS EPC or the new BPMN to model process activity flows, but Oracle favors BPMN, in keeping with its marketing theme of “standards-based BPM.” Unlike most other BPMN-based offerings, this is full BPMN – intermediate events, pools and message flows, etc.
Here is the cool part. From BPA Suite, you click a button to “share blueprint with IT”. This validates the BPMN and then exports it – or, let’s say, the part of it relevant to execution – to Oracle BPEL Designer (part of the SOA Suite), which runs in JDeveloper. Oracle calls what is interchanged “shared metadata,” and the interchange format is not XPDL or BPDM, but… you guessed it, BPEL. The blueprint is a quasi-BPMN diagram that is a graphical representation of the shared metadata, serialized in BPEL. So the shapes look (mostly) like BPMN, although the diagram retains some of the block structure of BPEL… but all in all, I would say definitely understandable by any business analyst trained in BPMN. Executable detail added in BPEL Designer is reflected automatically in the blueprint, so business and IT stay in sync through this shared metadata expressed graphically in the blueprint. Very nice.
A second area that surprised me was integration of content management into BPM, leveraging Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent (in addition to its native Content DB), both as backend services and content-centric apps on top of BPM. Most BPM vendors have been slow to appreciate that human-centric BPM typically requires good integration with business documents out of the box.
A third surprise was what appears to be a successful effort to get ISVs to build on top of the platform. Back in the old workflow days there was a vigorous ISV market, but somehow that hasn’t yet materialized with BPM.
9 Responses to “Oracle Making Strides in BPM”
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Dear Bruce,
it looks like Intalio is definitely pulling the BPM market. I found your description of ORACLE BPM suite very close to Ismael Ghalimi’s BPM2.0 prescriptions. (http://itredux.com/blog/bpm-20/).
I welcome this as good news: reaching a consensus on the high-level BPM model should help reducing the hype and develop a customer-focused BPM culture.
Kind Regards
Giancarlo
[...] Oracle Making Strides in BPM (tags: oracle bpm bpmn bpel cx) [...]
I am looking for BPMN compliance with full interoperability, including layout, across multiple modeling tools, supporting executable models in multiple BPM suites.
The work Baghat and the rest of his team have done over the last 18 months is indeed very impressive. It is interesting to see all the pieces come together pre-integrated. Good report!
Note: It might be great to get permission from vendors to capture screencasts and videos and embed them in this blog.
Best,
Edwin
Pl take a close look at what end users need out of a BPM solution. A well integrated standards based solution or another properietary solution, which will lead to a futur integration sore point. Oracle offering is that standards based solution!
Having just gone through a POC with Oracle I have to say that the round-tripping definitely does not work as advertised. Changes made to the BPEL in JDeveloper appear to the BAs in BPA (i.e. ARIS) as a comment saying more or less “something has changed”, and the BAs need to then speak to the developers and manually make the (hopefully) equivalent changes to the model. When the new version is then deployed back to BPEL the developers’ previous changes (e.g. integration points, scripting) can get completely lost and have to be redone from scratch.
It’s a nice vision but right now they are a long way from actually delivering it. A shame, since the individual components on their own are excellent, especially the BAM.
OpenSoft has just gone through the current Intalio BPMS 5.0.x offering including the 5.0.1 beta designer and the BPEL Engine server.
It was interesting reading CraigH comments as we implement and support oracle and intalio in the BPM space.
After having gone through the new designer and bpel server of Intalio, it is truly a platform that both BA’s and IT personnel can really collaborate without the issues that CraigH has indicated with a lot of power in the tool sets that really stack up to do just about anything any one wants to.
Comments that Oracle offers a platform that is a standards based solution is interesting as from what I have seen Intalio has an upper hand on standard’s at the moment, though things change quickly.
Responding to CraigH ’s comment: It is a user configurable option. Whether to allow IT users to update the business users’s BPMN diagram is a decision that each customer needs to make. Pl take a look at http://vishals.blogspot.com/20.....iness.html for real world feedback on this.
Thanks for the info Vishal, but we were told by Oracle representatives both at the time and in a couple of post-POC reviews that this was how it had been designed in order to fit with the Oracle Fusion development methodology. Certainly none of the half-dozen Oracle people we had onsite were aware that it was just a config setting.
Given the scale of the changes that were necessary in the BPEL to implement the necessary roles and skill-based work assignments I’m really curious to see how the system translates these back into EPC (we were only shown EPC for modelling). The resulting BPEL was very different from the original EPC model.
Regarding the decision about whether the business should allow IT to change the model, we have always planned for a co-operative model, since the final process map needs to reflect not only the real business process but also the realities and limitations of the underlying IT systems, including the BPEL engine.
One would assume that IT would only change the model if it was necessary in order to implement the desired process efficiently. It seems silly, not to mention error-prone, to then force the business/process analysts to have to re-enter the IT changes manually using a different tool and different notation.