EA - Enterprise Architecture in Action: Same time last year

Around Nov/Dec 06, I was listening to the SOA insights podcast where there were several views on SOA, Web 2.0 and BPM and whether there is interplay. This was around the same time as Oracle Openworld Show. There was the panel of Steve Garone, Joe Mckendick and Neil Macehiter and there was lot of discussion on the synergy, whether or not they understood each other and most important- were they complementary or competitive. At around this time at Infosys we had already put together our SOA viewpoint and built our delivery capability and won some great references.

Fast forward to Nov 07 we find that SOA and BPM are progressively getting tied at the hip. Many SOA projects are actually getting funded by opportunities of BPM in terms of simplification, optimization and automation. The reason why Oracle Openworld 07 came to fore is not only that it is current in San Francisco, but both Oracle and SAP have been putting all their development money behind SOA architectures and reference models with emphasis on process models which have been the core of ERP packages.

The industry is very excited about the integration of BPM and SOA. Along with this comes event processing and next Business Intelligence. We walked into this scenario unwittingly with a client in UK and today it is hottest application of applied real time BI.

For one am enjoying the ride, but keep asking myself – what’s next?