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The verdict is out - BPM wins over SOA

With recent acquisition in BPM and SOA space, it is clear that those vendors who positioned themselves SOA vendor is feeling the pinch without a solid BPM offering. Now that IBM has acquired Lombardi and Progress has acquired Savvion it will be of interest to see how both of these companies going to use these product to position themselves in BPM space. However it is better to leave the roadmap definition with IBM and Progress. However the discussion point out here is; are these vendors responding to market need...

I guess the reality is; they are doing so. Over the last few years I had been following few emerging trends around BPM adoption and these trends are getting stronger day by day, which clearly indicates that BPM is gaining ground faster than SOA. Some of these trends are

  • Usage of BPM to deliver enterprise class application which enables IT to involve business stakeholders closely to deliver the solution with a considerable focus on business process KPI. And SOA being seen as a way of utilizing exiting IT application
  • Usage of BPM for process standardization, harmonization & continuous improvement, even in cases where ERP strategy is been adopted for process harmonization. Again SOA is seen as an architectural approach to ensure process decoupling to handle variations
  • Using BPM & BRMS for legacy modernization. Again SOA taking the back seat within organization in these legacy modernization drives
  • And the most important trend has been using BPM to deliver composite application. I guess this is something even biggies in ERP space like Oracle & SAP are adopting. Both of these vendors are making BPMs capability as an integral part of ERP offering and delivering ERP capability using Composite Application Framework.

However this does not mean that IT organization are ignoring the importance of SOA platform and SOA, they are just not positioning SOA in front of business any longer. In short SOA is seen by IT organization as the right approach to make existing system landscape flexible and geared up for change and BPM is seen as the way forward to collaborate with Business to deliver value.

Posted by Manas Kumar Sarkar on January 16, 2010 09:01 PM |

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Comments

BPM Wins?

I agree BPM gets the attention of the business, as it provides visible value to the business. But to impliment BPM without the underlying SOA architecture becomes a monumental task.
I have often seen BPM come in to play within the SOA solution as a method for managing composite applications. This is useful, but doesnt really lead to the advantages that BPM can provide to the business as a whole. True BPM needs to be driven by the business and SOA allows the IT to support and engage with the business in the development of the solution.
One area that I see becoming very interesting is the re-emergence of BI with BPM to allow the business to perform analysis on the BPM systems and performance over time of different processes and applications.
Just some thoughts...

Posted by: Mike Orist | February 8, 2010 07:13 PM

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