It seems my post yesterday, drawn from the press release, keynote slides, and mini-briefing, missed the coded messages in IBM's BPMS announcement. Here is the decoded version. The announcement of an "IBM BPM Suite" represents a big deal internally at IBM. It is intended to signify a commitment to a single BPMS based on interworking components from separate divisions - WebSphere, FileNet, Lotus, Rational, GBS, etc. It required signoff from all the various warlords - Rosamilia, Goyal, LeBlanc, Bowden, etc.
Keith Swenson revisits the nuisance of BPMN-BPEL roundtripping and casts the obvious solution - executable BPMN - in the guise of WYDIWYE, what-you-see-is-what-you-execute. I pretty much agree with Keith on this, but I have found that even though executable BPMN - as (he says) Fujitsu Interstage provides and (I would add) Lombardi, TIBCO, Appian, and others do as well - is obvously the right answer, it's sometimes not the actual answer in real life.
Tom Baeyens weighs in on my debate with Michael. He mostly sides with Michael, but I think because of a slight understanding of my stance. I'm not saying BPMN is all or nothing. Yes it has parts that are not very useful. And, like Michael, the tool vendors factor into my thinking as well, in particular the BPMS vendors who support BPMN's model-driven implementation style. So I, too, divide up BPMN constructs into different buckets, but with very different criteria.
Alex Toussaint offers a peek at AquaLogic BPM's improved BPMN support in the upcoming v6.1. The palette will include standard BPMN icons such asXOR, OR, and AND gateways, timer and message intermediate events, and I'm glad to see it. Now I just wish they could figure out a way to drag them out of the palette and into the actual process diagram. **Note added 4/29 - Jesper suggests this as a better example of BPMN "
If you want to jump-start your BPMN efforts, I'll be offering a half-day pre-conference workshop on Process Modeling with BPMN at the upcoming Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Orlando. This Gartner event is the leading independent SOA and application infrastructure conference, and the agenda's 6 tracks and 70+ sessions cover future trends and latest best practices in application development, application integration, SOA, Web Services and Web2.0, as well as SaaS/Cloud Computing.
At Impact three weeks ago I just got the drive-by version, but now that I've gotten the full analyst deep dive, I have to say that IBM now really does seem to have its act together on BPM. The current v6.1 offering has a lot of the improvement built in already, and the July v6.1.2 has more. We'll be adding IBM to the BPMS Report series and Ratings in Q3, and they should do fairly well.
Regarding TIBCO's first-ever "analyst summit" at their annual user conference, I'll leave it to Sandy to record the actual content of the presentations to analysts. I'll stick to the impressionistic view. Apparently "the analysts" had told TIBCO they wanted to hear executives talk about go-to-market strategy, so we got almost nothing about product and an awful lot about "value propositions." Are there really analysts who want to spend half a day hearing about value props and selling tactics?
Surprisingly little information has reached public view concerning BPMN 2.0, now under consideration in OMG. Unlike most standards approval processes, the outcome of this one is not preordained. There are two submissions, quite different, and it could go either way. Oracle's Vishal Saxena notes that one reason BPMN 1.x has been so successful is that it "keeps simple things simple" by focusing on abstract business-level modeling, allowing developers flexibility in how to implement the technical details, and argues that BPMN 2.
Since my recent post, a bit more has dribbled out into the blogosphere about the negotiations over BPMN 2.0, most of it completely off track. But now SAP's David Frankel, definitely an insider, is shining a welcome light in those dark spaces with his BPMN 2.0 Update. The biggest difference between the two submissions is in how they define the BPMN 2.0 metamodel. The BPMN-S submission positions the OMG's Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) as the metamodel for BPMN 2.
When I began my BPMS Report series a few years back -- actually the predecessor reports, called the Manager's Guide to BPM Software -- my thought was that all that BPMS buyers needed to make a rational choice was a walkthrough of process design using the tools, presented in a standard format and terminology. Those reports were 100 pages long, and I soon discovered that few people wanted that long a walk.
