The most interesting keynote at the Intalio User Conference was by Greg Olson, founder of Coghead, a BPM-in-the-cloud service that uses Intalio as the process engine under the covers. Coghead bills itself as a next-generation platform for situational apps, such as built today on Excel, Access, or FileMaker. Instead of professional developers, Coghead targets independent web developers and power users. The platform is 100% web based, a multi-tenant service hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, with simple subscription-based pricing (free for single user).
This is starting to get good. Let's face it, not many people care about BPM standards, other than wouldn't it be nice if we could agree on some. I'm really no different, although at this point I would admit to having a vested interest in getting quickly to a version of BPMN that was portable between tools. So I've tried to publicize and opine on some of the issues behind the normally secret deliberations over BPMN 2.
Conrad Bock of NIST picks up the defense of BPDM where Fred Cummins left off. Since I don?t see much other discussion on the web about this important topic, I?m going to renew the thread here. Here are Conrad?s points: The calls for a BPMN metamodel started two or three years ago, including OMG reopening the BPDM submitter list to the new BPMI members, and invitations from the BPDM submitters at the time.
Today Oracle lifted the veil on its plans for BEA. Naturally, Oracle said the acquisition as a whole was not just for market share, but for BEA's technology, which would all become part of the Fusion middleware platform. There was a lot of material presented, but I'll focus on the product convergence plan as it relates to BPMS. To rationalize the product set, Oracle first sorted the BEA product catalog into one of three buckets: 1) strategic, where BEA was considered superior to existing Fusion components or a new capability; 2) continue and converge, where BEA component would be positioned as secondary, maintained but eventually merged into the current Fusion offering; and 3) maintenance, mostly OEM offerings, which it seems Oracle wants to walk away from as soon as they can.
Are you as sick as I am of so-called "architects" swiftboating BPM with phony strawman arguments? Here's the latest, from blogger Nick Malik: I like point out really nutty ideas, even when a lot of people have spent a lot of time investing in them.... [BPM] created pretty languages for describing business processes, and we started telling the business that once business processes are described using these languages, then you can push a button and "
Usually I have a definite opinion about what a BPMN construct means, and whether some diagram fragment is valid or not. Here I used to have an opinion, but now I'm not sure. I'm hoping a reader will set me straight. The issue is an intermediate event (e.g., message or timer) "floating" in a process or expanded subprocess alongside the regular flow, the one bounded by start and end events. The floating event has a sequence flow out, leading eventually to end event, but no sequence flow in.
[My November column on BPMInstitute.org] Nobody really cares about standards? until suddenly they do. When a standard reaches some threshold of adoption, a tipping point is reached. Then, if you?re not on the standard you?re proprietary. Legacy. A dinosaur. Not where you want to be. By this time next year we may see that tipping point for one piece of the BPM standards puzzle with a potential domino effect on the other pieces as well.
One of the main reasons I went to OMG Think Tank was to hear a detailed discussion of the two BPMN 2.0 proposals on the table, and the roadmap for adoption. But guess what? Not a single word about it on the agenda. Unbelievable. Heckuva job, Program Committee! Nevertheless I was able to get a feel for where things stand by talking to some of the protagonists. To review, there are two competing submissions.
Anyone interested in the history of BPM technology (brief as it is) should not miss Ismael Ghalimi's recounting of it, "Why All This Matters." As a seminal figure in that history, his discussion of the relationship between BPMN and BPEL, the two important standards in BPM, is especially notable. Neither standard is perfect. But while BPMN has succeeded in the BPMS world in spite of its shortcomings, BPEL's shortcomings have largely confined it to the SOA/integration space, where "
I'm at the annual OMG BPM Think Tank event in Chicago and, to be perfectly honest, it isn't working any more. This used to be my favorite BPM event, an industry insider deal, just vendors and consultants - no users - talking about standards and how to move BPM forward as an "industry." You had the top technical guys from the tools vendors, top consultants and analysts, lots of energy and spirited debate.
