The key piece is the roundtrip support. With the latest release, business users can create models in the Business Process Analysis Suite, software developers can view and modify those models for execution in Oracle’s SOA Suite middleware, with the changes then reflected back in the model that users work with in the process analysis piece. Oracle uses an underlying format which it calls Process Blueprint to represent the model in the design and execution ends.
Business Process Analysis Suite is available now.
Our View
In certain respects, the BPM market has become something of a commodity as virtually all vendors provide highly graphic workflow and process modelers in their design pieces, and increasingly are supporting web services standards as the way to expose those models for execution. So on the surface, there’s little to differentiate Oracles business process modeler from others.
The differentiators come in the way different vendors approach design and execution. Pure plays like Pegasystems emphasize embedded rules, while Lombardi is promoting a blueprints capability that is essentially a whiteboard for users who have few coding skills. On the execution side, the difference is how vendors approach process orchestration.
While all are expected to support BPEL, BPM pure plays emphasize designing the orchestrations back in the process and/or rules design portion, while the middleware platform players play up the ability to orchestrate on the fly within their SOA stacks. Obviously, Oracle would count itself in the latter group, which also includes BEA, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, and JBoss.
But where Oracle departs is the promise that, eventually, its business process analysis engine will become the core process modeler of its future Fusion applications. That’s all in the future, whenever that happens. For now, Oracle pitches the fact that its Business Process Analysis Suite becomes the standards based way of customizing extensions to its Oracle e-business, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, and Siebel applications.
