We hope you enjoy this podcast. We’d love to hear your feedback on the series. Just email us or leave a comment here.

Remember: sign up for next week’s CTO Tuesdays here. We will be expanding on persistence to talk about BPMS support for long-running transactions.

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CTO Tuesdays #16: The state of BPMS state: persistence for process

There are three formats of the webinar attached to this post. For iTunes and iPod touch/iPhone users, an .m4v is available. A Flash file that can be streamed from the blog and/or downloaded is attached and a Windows Media 9 .wmv is also available.

Please remember to register for next week’s CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot

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CTO Tuesdays #15: Using Java with business processes

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searchSOA.com discusses Service Component Architecture (SCA)

There are three formats attached to this post. First, an iPod touch/iPhone-formatted .m4v. We also have a Flash file that can be streamed from the blog and a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv.

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VOSibilities podcast #45: An introduction to T-Impact

That’s how we feel about business process management systems (BPMS) and enterprise content management systems (ECM). These two important technologies are made for each other.

If you have an important business process you want to automate, it’s likely to have people, processes and documents that all need to work together. And, you are likely to want everything to work together based on open, industry-wide standards. We’d go so far as to say, it’s an absolute requirement that the BPMS and ECM be totally based on standards.

That’s what Alfresco and ActiveVOS offer together. The best capabilities; the most openness.

Watch the replay of this webinar — and the absolutely brilliant demo of ActiveVOS BPMS and Alfresco ECM working together — to see how you can quickly, easily and compatibly produce better process applications for your organization.

There are three formats attached to this post, along with a PDF of the slides presented in the webinar. First is an iPod touch/iPhone-formatted .m4v. Second, a Flash .flv file that can be downloaded or played from the blog. Third, a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv is available.

We hope you enjoy this introduction to combining BPM and ECM technologies.

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VOSibilities podcast #43: Combining BPMS and ECM for better process applications

XPDL 2.1 is already supported by many tools, including ActiveVOS, so extending XPDL to support the new constructs in BPMN 2.0 will provide the fastest path for most vendors to achieve some level of interoperability of their BPMN 2.0 models.

Nonetheless, I’ve found that most people who have asked Active Endpoints about model import/export formats have been people who have the wrong idea of how to work with a BPMS. These are people who are trying to hold on to their old waterfall methodology for building software, where there are separate tools for building process models during analysis from the development tools that are later used to create the software. In that world, there is a constant need to translate back and forth between the tools as changes may occur on either side.

And there’s the rub. The roundtrip translation always loses so much information that the effort to keep the separate representations in sync and accurate outweighs the value of using the automatic export / import functionality. Eventually, changes made on the analysis side get redone on the implementation side by hand, and vice versa.

The right way to work is to let the BPMS own the model. Yes, you may want to allow early requirements gathering to use simpler modeling tools, but those tend to be fairly informal flow charts anyway. Once you get involved in real modeling you should use the modeling capabilities of your BPMS. By “real modeling”, I mean that you are at the stage where the precise semantics of the notation used is important, since it is going to drive the actual semantics of the resulting software.

In the early phases, the process models are diagrams where the labels on the diagram are what really matter. For example, the arrows coming out of an activity might formally imply that both directions can be followed at once, but the labels on the arrows have labels that imply that one one of them will happen. This is OK during the early stages of modeling, since it is another human who is going to be reading the model and they can guess what was really meant (or they can ask, if they aren’t sure).

Once you are ready to do real modeling, it is time to get the BPMS involved. That way the process model you create will go the rest of the way through the lifecycle of the project without need for translation, much less round-trip translation. How you get from the informal stage to the formal stage of process modeling isn’t really all that important. Yes, you can use XPDL 2.1, but it doesn’t really even matter if you have to redraw it from scratch. Drawing it is very fast in a capable designer like ActiveVOS, and the person doing the modeling is already going to have to be carefully considering each jot and tiddle of the original diagram to determine how to correctly model what the user really wanted to begin with.

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The BPMS owns the model

Three versions of the podcast are attached. An iPod touch/iPhone-formatted .m4v, a Flash file that can be downloaded and/or played from the blog and a Windows Media 9-formatted .wmv

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VOSibilities podcast #42: Where does BPM go now? A business and technology perspective

Everyone agrees: for BPM to succeed as a new approach to developing applications, BPMSs need to be based on fundamentally sound application architecture. Today, that means using SOA principles. Here’s a link to this important article.

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searchSOA.com: “This the moment for SOA-based BPMS to shine”

Attached to this post are three versions of the webinar. First is an iPod-formatted .m4v file. Second, a Flash .flv. Third, we have attached a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv. Finally, we have also attached a PDF of the presentation John delivered.

We hope you enjoy this episode of CTO Tuesdays. We hope, over time, to have additional guest CTOs on the podcast to talk about complementary technologies. And we’d love to hear your suggestions for topics as well as your comments and feedback.

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CTO Tuesdays #12: ECM and BPMS Working Together

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Alfresco CTO to present on “CTO Tuesdays”

Three versions of the webinar are attached to this post: an iPod-formatted .m4v file, a Flash .flv file and a Windows Media 9-formatted .wmv.

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CTO Tuesdays #11: Structured and unstructured BPMN modeling

There are three formats available. First, an iPod-formatted .m4v. Second, a Flash .flv file which can be streamed directly from the blog or downloaded. Third, a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv. The .wmv file is about 55MB in size; the other two are about 96MB.

Please feel free to request an evaluation of ActiveVOS to begin to apply what you see and learn in this webinar to your business processes.

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VOSibilities podcast #41: ActiveVOS 7 and IBM Rational Requirements Composer

We have posted three formats of the webinar replay. First is an iPod-formatted .m4v file. Also, a Flash file that can be played from the blog and/or downloaded. Finally, we have included a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file.

Please join us every week at noon ET, 9am PT and 17:00 GMT for CTO Tuesdays.

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CTO Tuesdays #10 Using requirements gathering tools with a BPMS

In our first episode of the new year, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley covers some basic theory of how complex event processing (CEP) works and makes the case for integrating a CEP engine directly into the BPM engine. Topics covered include the Event Processing Language (EPL), time windows as a method of correlating disparate events and event streams. In short, a fascinating — and accessible — introduction to a hot technical topic.

We have attached several formats of the webinar replay to this post. First, for iTunes subscribers, we have a .m4v file, perfect for taking along on your iPod. RSS feed subscribers will automatically receive this file. Also, there’s a .flv file which can be played directly on the blog (click where it says “click here” to play it). Also, we have attached a Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file. Finally, the slides Michael presented are attached as a .pdf.

Be sure to join us live every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 17:00 UTC for a new topic. You can always register for the upcoming CTO Tuesdays webinar at http://www.activevos.com/ctot. Replays are usually posted here on our blog within 48 hours.

We have an exciting agenda of upcoming episodes, and later in the first part of Q1, we hope to guest CTOs join us for their perspectives on technical topics. We hope you will join us live each week.

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CTO Tuesdays #9: BPM as an event source for CEP

Wow! What a time to be in the BPM marketplace. First, IBM buys Lombardi…then yesterday, Progress Software announced its acquisition of Savvion.

What do these acquisitions say about the state of BPM and the BPMS marketplace? You won’t be surprised to hear us suggest that a) these moves are proof the BPM market is growing as BPM begins to take hold as the default way to create process applications and b) we’ve think we’ve been right all along about the need to make BPM something that IT and business end users can collaborate on to produce results.

For those of you who might be new to the “BPM Feud,” there are two big camps in this classic Hatfields vs. McCoys argument. On one side are those who believe you can develop enterprise-class process apps by having end users model their processes which can then be implemented “around” IT. On the other side are those who believe that only IT is capable of delivering process applications that don’t become “islands” of processing, which remain disconnected from the rest of the application infrastructure and which, over time, become a burden to maintain and update.

And believe me — this is no ordinary, restrained battle. There’s vitriol aplenty from each side directed at the other. If you’d been with me and our CTO Michael Rowley as we talked to the press and analysts in 2009, you’d be shocked at how hard the battle lines have been drawn. We’ve talked to otherwise brilliant people who think that because of the familiarity with computing created by things like Google Mail and Facebook, true end users now have both the skills and alacrity to develop apps that are part of the core processing inside the enterprise. And, we’ve talked to equally brilliant people in the other camp who seem to want to return to the days of raised-floor mainframe computer rooms…replete with lab-coat dressed high priests and priestesses of IT who control access to computing resources.

Our approach has been to be pragmatic. We’ve always believed that good BPM technology should promote collaboration among an extended development team…one that includes both IT and end users. As far back as last summer, we were exploring this topic in a webinar in which Sandy Kemsley articulates succinctly the folly of the arguments for anything other than collaboration. If her “Four Myths” don’t ring true to you, you’ve staked out a position at the far end of one side of the feud or the other.

And now, we would suggest, these two acquisitions make an even stronger case for ending the feud and realizing that for BPM to deliver what we all believe it can for business, there will be collaboration…the business end user drives…but the mouse is likely to be in the hands of an IT professional.

This realization is what’s propelling these moves…and more and more people are beginning to overtly suggest it. Tony Baer’s recent post (also here on Dana Gardner’s blog) on the acquisitions makes exactly this point:

The traditional appeal of BPM was that it was a business stakeholder-friendly approach to developing solutions that didn’t rely on IT programmatic logic. The mythology around BPM pure-plays was that these were business user, not IT-driven software buys. In actuality, they simply used a different language or notation: process models with organizational and workflow-oriented semantics as opposed to programmatic execution language. That stood up only as long as you used BPM to model your processes, not automate them.

Consequently, it is not simply the usual issues of vendor size and viability that are driving IT stack vendors to buy up BPM pure plays. It is that, but more importantly, if you want your BPM tool to become more than documentware or shelfware, you need a solution with a real runtime. And that means you need IT front and center, and the stack people right behind it. Even with emergence of BPMN 2.0, which adds support for executables, the cold hard facts are that anytime, anything executes in software, IT must be front and center. So much for bypassing IT.

Well said, Tony. We violently agree.

It’s precisely this point — which increasingly buyers of BPMS seem to know even if many tastemakers don’t — which we believe has propelled ActiveVOS to the head of the “I-want-BPM-I-can-collaborate-with-end-users-on-which-is-also-executable” pack. It’s why we think we’ve had growing success…and it’s why these acquisitions have taken place.

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Will acquiring BPM companies end the feud?

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ActiveVOS Experiences Rapid Sales Growth in Q4 2009

In this episode, Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley gives what might be the most concise, “digestable” overview of BPMN 2.0 available on the Web. If you are new to BPMN and want to see what it can do for you and your organization, this content is for you. In this webinar, Rowley discusses basic BPMN notation, including activities, events and gateways. And, in an expansive Q&A following the presentation, Rowley answers questions about the use and capabilities of BPMN.

There are four attachments contained in this post. First, an iPod-formatted .m4v recording of the webinar. This is for subscribers to the podcast in iTunes (search on “vosibilities”). Next, is a Flash .flv file which is intended to stream from the blog, though at the small size I have to limit the player to on the blog (416×312), it’s not the best experience. The .flv file itself is at 640×480, so feel free to download it if you want to play it locally. Next we have the original-sized Windows Media 9-encoded .wmv file. Finally, a PDF of the slides Rowley presented are attached.

We hope you find this content useful. You can always access the replays of CTO Tuesdays here on our blog, www.vosibilities.com in the “CTO Tuesdays” category, in our podcast on iTunes and via www.ctotuesdays.com or, for an RSS feed, www.ctotuesdays.com/feed. We’re trying to make it easy to find and use this content, so if there’s a method you prefer we haven’t accounted for, please let us know.

CTO Tuesdays will return to our every-Tuesday-at-noon-ET schedule in early January, 2010.  Next year we have some exciting additions planned, including guest appearances of CTOs from other leading technology companies. Make sure you sign up to attend every week. You can always sign up for the next episode at www.activevos.com/ctot.

Finally, in answer to a question we had in the Q&A, here’s a link to the OMG specification for BPMN 2.0. In Annex A of this document, you can find the differences between BPMN 1.2 and BPMN 2.0.

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CTO Tuesdays #8: An Introduction to BPMN

CTO Tuesdays has been getting great feedback from our growing audience, and I’d like to offer this week’s episode as a good example of why. The discussion of BPMN 2.0 and BPEL flows is something you might not find elsewhere, delivered in an objective way and surrounded by stimulating questions and discussion with attendees. I hope you will join us every Tuesday at 17:00 GMT and participate as well. You can register at http://www.activevos.com/ctot. The replays are always available at http://www.ctotuesdays.com or via our RSS feed at http://www.ctotuesdays.com/feed

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CTO Tuesdays #6: Diamond patterns in BPEL and BPMN

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ActiveVOS BPMS Automates Information Sharing for Government Security Agency

Still?

The BPMN 2.0 spec just went to beta in August and no vendor yet has an implementation of the new BPMN 2.0 execution language. So at this point the debate is just getting started. We can only compare what exists (BPMN 2.0 with BPEL execution) with the theoretical idea of a product that will someday implement the new BPMN 2.0 execution language.

At that point we will be able to get a real side-by-side comparison. Until that time, we have to guard against “shiny-new-thing syndrome,” where the newly envisioned technology gets to paint a wonderful picture looking toward the horizon, while actual working technology has to compete against that vision bearing the stains that come from living where the rubber meets the road.  Although, in this case, even the horizon envisioned by the BPMN 2.0 execution language is tainted by some pretty scary-looking smoke.

Bruce dismissed my assertion that BPMN 2.0 on top of BPEL is simpler than the new BPMN 2.0 execution language with the following:

Simpler for whom?  When you sort it all out, he’s actually saying BPEL is simpler for an engine vendor because it doesn’t have overlapping or alternative constructs like BPMN does.  No one would argue with that, but who cares?  No engine vendor is going to support every possible BPMN 2.0 element and attribute called out in the metamodel.  And I’m not saying just in the first release.  Not ever.  In that sense, BPMN 2.0 is not a self-contained execution language like BPEL is.

We disagree. Because we’ve actually built an execution engine, we know that it is actually pretty easy to implement alternative overlapping language constructs. This debate about simplicity isn’t about what a vendor can build — it’s about what the ultimate impact of that engine technology is on the user who designs and deploys processes on that engine.

My concern is for the poor person who is trying to figure out what is going wrong with a process that occasionally gets stuck. Forward progress for a process that uses the BPMN 2.0 execution language depends on a complex interplay between a huge number of constructs: event handlers, correlation mechanisms, data-flow with optional and required data, and token-based control flow that has to account for multiple tokens flowing simultaneously on a single sequence flow.

The problem with a language that is large and complex is that it is hard to have any confidence that what you’ve created will always work the way that you expect it to in production, especially when you can only test a small subset of the exponential number of possible execution scenarios.

Bruce’s admission that “BPMN is not a self-contained execution language” is noteworthy and I hope people pay close attention to it. Why do people care about standards for the languages that they use for their software? The answer is portability – primarily portability of skills but also portability of code and interoperability of tools. Basically, they are looking for an ecosystem around the language.

I love the fact that portability of skills will be enhanced by the standardization of BPMN as a notation, but for all of the constructs that are necessary to get the thing to actually execute, it seems like there are two choices: use BPEL, which is (despite assertions to the contrary) quite portable, or use some vendor’s subset/interpretation of the new BPMN 2.0 execution language. By “interpretation” I mean that even strict conformance to BPMN 2.0 admits incredible levels of freedom that are counterproductive to the creation of a language ecosystem. The most egregious example of this is the fact that the type system is pluggable. Few things are more important in a language than the type system, and yet BPMN 2.0 allows vendors to choose their own.

Bruce’s attack on the use of BPEL with BPMN rests on the assumption that: “BPEL is inherently block oriented, like a computer program, while BPMN is inherently graph oriented, like a flowchart.” Actually, BPEL supports both styles (although with some caveats). Here is a process built using ActiveVOS that is standard BPEL:

Doesn’t this look like a flow chart to you?

The one caveat that BPEL put on this style is that the loops have to be nested. This is where I agree with Bruce – without any extensions, BPEL does have an issue with “interleaved loops.” From my experience, interleaved loops are not the most common case, but if you do have a process where interleaved loops are the most natural way to represent it, what do you do? You have two choices: 1) with the use of variables, you can always rework the graph so that the loops aren’t interleaved; or, 2) you can use an extension to BPEL that removes the looping links restriction. This is an extension that is supported by both Active Endpoints and IBM and does away this nagging issue in the mapping between BPMN and BPEL. And it does this without thowing the entire language out the window and starting from scratch to make a bigger, more complex language.

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BPMN 2.0 with BPEL — the debate is just starting

Active Endpoints CTO Michael Rowley then demonstrates using a BPMN 2.0 modeler to create executable BPEL processes.

A panel with Jeffrey and Michael follows the presentations.

Attached to this post are three files. An iPod-encoded .m4v file, a Windows Media 9-encoded file and a PDF of the slides that Jeffrey and Michael presented.

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VOSibilities podcast #39: Modeling process applications with BPMN 2.0

BPEL is complex and BPMN is simple, right? After all, BPMN has a nice graphical notation. The BPEL standard only specifies what the language looks like in XML. That alone ought to be enough claim the prize for BPMN.

However, what if you use BPMN’s notation for a process but use BPEL for the executable representation? This removes the graphical vs. XML distinction and can “hide” the non-graphical BPEL as represented in XML. You end up with a BPMN model everyone can understand and a BPEL model your computers can execute. It’s like the two sides of a coin: there are different pictures on each side, but the coin itself is always both sides at once.

However the question of which is simpler gets more complicated when you also consider that the new BPMN 2.0 specification includes hundreds of constructs in its meta-model that have no graphical representation. Now, which is simpler, BPMN with BPEL or BPMN with the new BPMN 2.0 execution language? What may seem obvious (BPMN with BPMN 2.0 execution) isn’t the slam-dunk choice many people might expect it to be.

BPMN 2.0 has two different — but equal — compliance points for execution: BPEL Process Execution Conformance and Process Execution Conformance. This means that BPMN 2.0 standardizes the use of BPEL as the execution language for BPMN, but it also offers the option of making BPMN executable by using new constructs that have been added to the BPMN notation specifically to support execution. These new constructs depend on the execution semantics that have been defined for almost everything in BPMN.

So, which is simpler? Believe it or not, using BPMN with BPEL execution is dramatically simpler than trying to execute processes using the new BPMN 2.0 execution language. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, so I will justify it in this post and a series of follow-up posts on the same subject.

Before I get into the details of why I believe BPMN with BPEL is better, a little history might help clarify the question. There are some factors that caused the BPMN 2.0 standard to eventually become more complex than BPEL. (I know, I know, BPEL has the reputation of being far too complex…but hear me out.)

BPMN was designed to be a language for communicating from one person to another, not from a person to a machine. Languages used for human communication have a natural, and appropriate, tendancy to grow. Whenever people find that they frequently need to convey something that is awkward to express with their current vocabulary, they invent a new word. English, which is especially amenable to such growth, surpassed one million words last year. Just consider “unfriend” or “netbook,”  new words to express new ideas.

The same is true for graphical modeling languages. Look at UML (Universal Modeling Language). It started as the unification of three fairly simple graphical notations (best known by their respective primary inventors: Rumbaugh, Coad & Yourdan, and Grady Booch). Once they unified their modeling languages and people started using them in earnest, they grew larger and larger, with new diagrams and new elements on those diagrams with each successive version. Sure there was always overlap in what could be expressed by different diagrams or different elements, but in each case, there were situations where one was more natural to the reader than the other. The fact that different constructs have imprecise overlapping meanings is of little concern in a language meant for people, since people are comfortable with choosing among a variety of ways of expressing the same thing, each with their own nuances and connotations.

But while notation creep is a useful way of expanding spoken languages or graphical notations, it is not such a good thing for a language that must be directly executable on a computer.

That’s because it is always a problem to take such a large language and give it formal executable semantics. The problem usually isn’t with a lack of rigor in the definition of any one construct. The problem is with the exponential number of combinations of those constructs.

Good programming languages typically add new fundamental primitives very cautiously. Consider how much hard preparatory work was done in the Java community before Java introduced generics into the language, or the hand wringing that is gripping that community as they grapple with the addition of closures to the language. The way it typically works is that some eminently-respectable, highly-credentialed expert (like Neal Gafter, in the case of closures) will make a seemingly very well-thought-out proposal that describes how the new construct will simplify the lives of so many programmers. Then another equally eminent expert (like Josh Bloch, in this case) will find unintended consequences of the new construct when it is used in combination with other things in the language.

That was just for one language feature. The BPMN 2.0 execution language has dozens of features that have never really been used together in an execution language. For example, the BPMN 2.0 execution not only has a variety of ways of handing the control flow for multiple incoming sequence flows, activities also can’t execute until all of the required inputs from one of the activities input datasets has become available. In other words, it has a fairly complex data flow model intertwined with its control flow model.

Another example is message correlation. BPEL has, in the past, been criticized for the complexity of its approach to correlation, but BPMN has two different correlation mechanisms. Key-based correlation is basically equivalent to BPEL’s correlation mechanism, although the standard has invented all new terminology for the various components. It then defines a new concept of context-based correlation. Rather than trying to convince you that it is complex, I’ll just include the complete explanation of it from the BPMN 2.0 specification (yes, in a 500-page specification, there are no examples or additional explanations for these concepts):

In context-based correlation, the Process context (i.e., its Data Objects and Properties) may dynamically influence the matching criterion. That is, a CorrelationKey may be complemented by a Process-specific CorrelationSubscription. A CorrelationSubscription aggregates as many CorrelationProperty-Bindings as there are CorrelationProperties in the CorrelationKey. A CorrelationPropertyBinding relates to a specific CorrelationProperty and also links to a Formal-Expression which denotes a dynamic extraction rule atop the Process context. At runtime, the Correlation-Key instance for a particular Conversation is populated (and dynamically updated) from the Process context using these FormalExpressions. In that sense, changes in the Process context may alter the correlation condition.

Confused yet? Are you wondering not just why BPMN 2.0 needed to define and redefine an important concept like message correlation, but also wondering how, precisely, to implement BPMN correlation?

These are just a couple of the ways that BPMN’s new execution language is more complex that using BPMN with BPEL. BPEL is now a known commodity. It’s widely implemented. Many production applications are running BPEL today. There are many people with experience with it and the concepts in the language are well understood. With BPMN 2.0, it now has a standardized notation, so there is no need to work with a new language that is a big bag of language constructs whose interactions have never been exercised together.

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Which is simpler: BPMN or BPEL?

There are two attached versions of the webinar replay (an iPod-formatted .m4v and a DivX-encoded .avi). As always, you can register for the next episode of CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot. We look forward to your comments, suggestions and feedback.

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CTO Tuesdays #5: Engine-managed correlation

The bad news is that due to a technical issue, the audio for the host, our own Sonal Rajan, wasn’t recorded. This is shame because at the end of each topic, we always have an open Q&A session on the current topic to amplify the technical discussion. Unfortunately, these replays won’t have that Q&A because there’s no audio for the moderator. However, the actual presentation about message correlation was recorded just fine.

In the two attached versions of the webinar replay (an iPod-formatted .m4v and a DivX-encoded .avi), I have edited most of the silent introduction and the Q&A.

As always, you can register for the next episode of CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

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CTO Tuesdays #4: Message correlation

First, lets assume that you are convinced of the value of BPEL. You see that it is a great high-level language for creating business processes and orchestrating services. Its service-centric approach is simpler and better for long-term manageability and reuse than other approaches to business process management. It is an accepted OASIS standard with multiple vendor implementations, so investments in BPEL processes are not tied to a single vendor and you can find people who already know the language without having to train them from scratch.

But if you are convinced you want BPEL, why should you care about BPMN? There are two main reasons:

1) To get the value of a standard notation;

2) To improve collaboration with a wide variety of stakeholders in the process, since BPMN is a significant simplification over existing notations used for BPEL.

When WS-BPEL 2.0 was standardized, the OASIS Technical Committee chose not to standardize a graphical notation for it. This was unfortunate, since no one creates a business process by writing BPEL in XML, which is the only standardized representation. Every vendor, and every BPEL developer, creates their processes using a graphical representation, but that representation is different for every tool.

And the notations used by these tools haven’t really been very good. They typically provide a one-to-one correspondence between control flow constructs in BPEL and things on the canvas. However, if you use the BPMN notation, it shows a notation that can mostly be understood without any knowledge of BPEL or even BPMN for that matter (as long as the labels are chosen carefully).

Let me make both of these points with the help of a trivial process example. Take a look at the BPMN representation of a process that I’ll call the “Question” process.

(Click on each image to see a larger version)

It is trivial to follow what is going on, especially if you know the standard notation. You can’t tell by looking at this diagram, but I’ve used two different BPEL mechanisms for getting to the next activity. I use a BPEL link to get from “Receive Q” to the first diamond (the beginning of the BPEL if statement). I use a BPEL sequence to get from the second diamond (the end of the if) to the “Record Answer” activity.

The user who is looking at the graphical representation of the process doesn’t need to know about the distinction between these two mechanisms, so the diagram doesn’t show a difference. The developer may want to know about the difference, so ActiveVOS highlights them differently on mouse-over and shows them differently in the “process outline view”, but that isn’t really important for today’s discussion.

What is important is how different the process is represented in different tools due to the fact that no notation had been standardized. I’ll show what this process looks like in three different BPEL process designers.

Here is how ActiveVOS would represent this process in previous versions of the product (or using the optional “classic” style in 7.0):

Here is how the Eclipse BPEL Designer represents it:

And, here is how the designer for Oracle’s BPEL Process Manager represents it:

In all three of these representations, each of the paths through the if statement are represented by a bounding box. The problem with this representation is that nested if statements can result in so many nested bounding boxes that it is hard to follow what is going on. BPMN simply has arrows through each path and the paths merge back into a single control flow at a gateway diamond.

Also notice the differences in the handling of links vs. sequences. Both ActiveVOS classic and Eclipse represent sequences with their own bounding boxes, then any arrow that is a direct child of a sequence box is known to belong to the sequence, rather than being a real link. Eclipse also draws the links in different color. The extra sequence icon and corresponding bounding box just interferes with the ability for non-technical users to follow what is going on in the process.

Oracle’s designer is odd in this respect. Sequences are not shown in a bounding box, so they don’t clutter up the control flow (a good thing in my opinion), but links aren’t shown at all! There is a link from the “Receive_Q” activity to the if statement, but there isn’t any representation of it on the diagram. It shows the “Receive_Q” and the if as if they happen in parallel. You have to look into the properties of “Receive_Q” to discover that it has an outgoing link, and further rummaging to find out where it goes.

The BPMN representation is, by far, the easiest version of this small process to understand. The process illustrates just three constructs whose representation is simpler with BPMN than with other approaches: ifs, sequences and links. The other BPEL constructs are generally as easy or easier for non-technical users to understand than previous approaches.

But, as valuable as the improvement in readability may be, the greater value that BPMN brings to be BPEL is probably consistency. Having different tools represent similar constructs in such different ways is detrimental to one of the key values in having a standard: skills portability. With a common notation, people will be able to carry their knowledge of how to understand and work with standards-based business processes between vendor tools. It will also create a greater incentive for people to learn these technologies and for schools to teach them. After all, people aren’t usually to thrilled about investing a lot of energy into learning proprietary technologies, and no school really wants to be teaching proprietary technologies.

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Why use BPMN for BPEL?

I think you will find Michael’s explanation of BPMN 2.0 event notation especially valuable.

I have attached two versions of the recorded webinar to this post. The first is an iPod-formatted .m4v. Also attached to this post is a Windows Media format .wmv file.

We have also made signing up for CTO Tuesdays and accessing the replays much easier. You can always sign up for the upcoming session of CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot. Replays are always available at http://www.ctotuesdays.com. And, an RSS feed of the replays is available at http://www.ctotuesdays.com/feed.

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CTO Tuesdays #3: BPMN and BPEL events

Attached to this post are three files. A PDF of the slides Dr. Rowley presented, an iPod-formatted .m4v file (which requires QuickTime or iTunes to be installed) and a more-or-less standard .avi file. The .avi is the larger of the two video files.

Due to a technical error (I didn’t press “show” on GoToMeeting), the first few minutes of the video show Michael’s slides, not the ones I am discussing. Since this is just an introduction, you won’t miss anything. I’ve put those “missing” slides into the .pdf file, so you can follow along if you want to.

We had a very lively panel discussion at the end of the presentation; I hope you’ll have the time to listen to the discussion that follows the presentation.

As always, we are very interested in your feedback, comments and topic suggestions.

One more note: you can always register for the upcoming CTO Tuesdays session by visiting http://www.activevos.com/ctot. We hope you join us for next week’s webinar.

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CTO Tuesdays #2: Introduction to WS-HumanTask

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ActiveVOS BPM and SoftConEx Revolutionize Airline Ticketing

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ebizQ podcast:How BPMS Delivers Value to Today’s Business

Every Tuesday, Active Endpoints’ CTO Michael Rowley, will present a topic of interest to BPM users. Our inaugural topic was an explanation of the meaning and uses of the BPMN 2.0 diamond symbol. If you are interested in learning BPMN 2.0 — or if you just want to brush up on some of the more advanced considerations in using this basic BPMN symbol — you will find this recording very instructive. Concepts are demonstrated in ActiveVOS 7’s new BPMN 2.0 modeler.

Attached to this post are two versions of the webinar: an iPod-formatted .m4v file our podcast subscribers will automatically receive and an H.264-encoded .avi file (which is much larger at about 113MB).

We welcome your input and suggestions for CTO Tuesdays. Contact us via email at editor at activevos dot com. Today, the best way to be notified of upcoming CTO Tuesdays is to be on our mailing list. And, the best way to get onto our mailing list is to download a trial of ActiveVOS. You can also register for upcoming CTO Tuesdays by clicking on the link in the right hand column of any interior page on www.activevos.com.

We are working hard on making registering for CTO Tuesdays easier. But because of the demand for education on topics like BPMN 2.0, we started the webinar series without waiting to dot all the “i’s” and cross all our “t’s.”

Update: You can now register for CTO Tuesdays by clicking the link in the right-hand column of any page on www.activevos.com except the home page. So, just navigate into the site a little and you’ll get a little reward: easy access to registration for CTO Tuesdays.

Updated update: You can now always register for the upcoming CTO Tuesdays at http://www.activevos.com/ctot.

We hope you enjoy this recording and that you will join us as your schedule permits for the live CTO Tuesdays every Tuesday at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT (17:00 GMT after the end of US daylight savings time in November, 2009).

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CTO Tuesdays #1: The BPMN diamond

Well, it’s the day after our big push to liberate Oracle SOA Suite 11g users during Oracle “Open”World in San Francisco.

And I am almost at a loss of words to describe our experience and the effect we seemed to have had. But, I gotta try. Here are some semi-random comments.

We are extraordinarily grateful for IDG News reporter Chris Kanaracus’s story, which perfectly captured the reasons we stood on a street corner for two days to make sure people understand that alternatives to high costs and lock-in exist.

Our social media meetup was a great success…and a lot of fun. We shared photos and videos of the event. (Here’s a video of the main reason for the party. ) I kid you not, the coolest people are the people who you befriend first online and then have the pleasure of meeting in the real world.

On Tuesday, October 14, we were hit with a rain storm that dumped a month of rain on San Francisco in about six hours. In spite of the high winds and Biblical downpours, we persisted in our mission of liberation from Oracle SOA Suite 11g.

You can check out videos on our YouTube channel (you have to see…and I mean you really have to see — the video titled “In the rain”), see stills in our Flickr photostream and, for our podcast subscribers, I’ve enclosed a short iPod-formatted video in the RSS feed. There’s also an HD-version of the video, for those that want to “be there” with us. Both are attached to this post.

Finally, you might find Otis Maxwell’s post about our attack on SOA Suite interesting. Otis’s description of how he found our meetup is very interesting. He calls what we did “suitcasing.” I think it’s simpler: we poked Oracle in the eye…and people loved it.

In case you are one of the folks who didn’t get the cards we handed out with the 11 things to consider before using SOA Suite 11g, here’s an image:

As you can imagine, pulling something like this off takes planning and dedication. I want to thank Sonal Rajan and Leslie Minasian, both of Active Endpoints, and Pat Flanders for their hard work and dedication.

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Liberation from Oracle SOA Suite, Biblical storms and a social media meetup

Tomorrow (Tuesday, October 13) at 4pm, we are hosting a meetup to pick three iPod nano winners from among all of the posted photos and videos. Lots of people were creating images today…remember to post them anywhere that’s convenient and then join us tomorrow for the meetup. It’s at the Thirsty Bear, 661 Howard Street. That’s just a block away from Moscone…down the street from the W Hotel.

(click on the image for a larger picture)

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Pose with the prisoners pix

We’re having fun. In the video below, you can see that people are enjoying the humor and taking the time to read our “11 things to consider before using Oracle SOA Suite 11g.” They’re also posing with our prisoners and shooting video and photos. So, we expect a great turnout tomorrow at the meetup. Remember: you can win an iPod nano for the best photo/video of the prisoners at the meeting. The judges are the audience. So, join us for some drinks, snacks and fun.

Check out  some of the video and photos below.

First, we “cowboy up” at a Starbucks, then hit the streets before dawn to get a head start on liberation from SOA Suite 11g. Reactions are positive…from the woman who stands on the street corner reading the 11 things to consider about SOA Suite to the person complimenting our costumes:

The look of relief on a newly-liberated attendee:

After release from 11g prison, it’s all smiles on the streets of San Francisco:

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ActiveVOS “liberates” Oracle OpenWorld

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Dennis Byron on ActiveVOS 7 BPM

Today, we are very pleased to announce another customer success story for ActiveVOS. Details are in the press release attached to this post.

This story is of particular note because we are showing ActiveVOS 7 this week at the Gartner BPM Summit. In this morning’s opening keynote, I listened as Janelle Hill and Jim Sinur described the benefits of BPM: speed, flexibility, responsiveness, business-owner-driven change, competitive advantage.

I was all smiles. See, I had the pleasure of interviewing the customer for this press release. As Janelle and Jim  described the possibilities of BPM — how it can fundamentally change businesses — I remembered the interview with TheWatchery.Com and our excitement when they told us that ActiveVOS had allowed them to make millions of dollars overnight because they could change their processes so quickly. I think this story embodies much of what we are hearing about at the BPM Summit.

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Time is money for TheWatchery.Com using ActiveVOS

As we promised in part 1 of of our discussion on the new features in the ActiveVOS 7 BPMS, we are delighted to post part 2 of a conversation among me (Alex Neihaus), Luc Clément and Michael Rowley. In this second podcast, Michael and Luc cover topics that are of interest to enterprise architects, developers and operations staff. Topics include continuous development (including support for the open-source Hudson project) and new features in the BPMN designer that improve productivity and operational enhancements.

We hope you enjoy this podcast.

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VOSibilities podcast #38: ActiveVOS 7.0, part 2

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Active Endpoints announces ActiveVOS 7.0

As has become something of a tradition here at Active Endpoints, I recently sat down with CTO Michael Rowley and Sr. Director of Products Luc Clément to talk about ActiveVOS 7.0 from the perspective of two of the people who have been heavily involved in the design and development of this major release.

ActiveVOS 7.0 is a major release of the BPMS and contains many new innovative capabilities. In fact, our discussion of the new BPMN 2.0 design canvas and our new AJAX forms design capability which allows humans to become services in an orchestration was so interesting that we decided to cover other new features in an additional podcast so as to not run too long in this one.

Michael, Luc and I will record a part 2 covering those features soon. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this introduction to ActiveVOS 7.0 BPMN 2.0 design with BPEL execution and the discussion of how WS-HumanTask was implemented in an AJAX forms designer.

Update: As promised, we have posted part 2 of this discussion here.

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VOSibilities podcast #37: ActiveVOS 7.0, part 1

Joe McKendrick has revisited the debate about the relationship of BPM and SOA by commenting on JP Morgenthal’s assertion that SOA and BPM initiatives should be kept separate.

With all due respect to JP, we think he’s got it wrong. BPM and SOA do need to be reconciled.

JP seems to have fallen into a trap that confuses the need to achieve two complimentary goals with the need to combine the initiatives that strive for those goals.

So sure, the initiative to introduce a business process culture into an organization should be separate from an initiative that drives toward a service-oriented architecture, but both initiatives have to be able to succeed. Those that merely view BPM as the killer application that justifies purchasing stacks of “SOA” middleware are missing the key “BPM” value proposition. Conversely, pure-play BPMers risk building impenetrable fortresses of locked in process that can’t be shared/reused.

In JP’s world, the benefits of BPM will not materialize for either the business which is trying to rationalize work or by the architecture groups trying to rationalize infrastructure supporting that work. In order for them both to succeed, any application that is developed with a BPMS must introduce its new functionality as a collection of services.

Implementing “BPM” does not suddenly provide an excuse to intertwine business logic with presentation logic. Reusable services must be created in order for the long-term success of the enterprise and its BPM initiatives. BPM must be inclusive – not a fiefdom.

Workflow, human interaction, reports, event processing — all need to be incorporated in a service-based architecture if we’re ever to get to better business (i.e. BPM) and IT (i.e. infrastructure) alignment. In other words, BPM itself needs to be service-oriented.

Without a major course correction in current BPM-SOA approaches (with BPM as a consumer of services only) the respective visions of BPM and SOA stakeholders will not materialize. A service-oriented BPM has a much better chance of yielding an outcome where BPM and SOA can actually share and deliver on a common vision. Claiming, as JP does, that SOA and BPM “are not – repeat not – related” gives the incorrect impression that people who are creating business processes don’t need to care about SOA and that people creating services don’t need to care about BPM.

Neither is true.

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BPM and SOA belong together

This version is a draft of the What’s New in ActiveVOS 7.0 document. Please check back frequently for updated versions.

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What’s New in ActiveVOS 7.0

A panel of industry experts discuss the impact of Software AG’s acquisition of IDS Sheer and what it might mean for BPM vendors, especially SAP.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Podcast #44: Big moves in BPM and SOA

Over the past year, we have invested heavily in ActiveVOS to turn it into the best BPMS for the development team. Why did we become a BPMS? Why not just remain a BPEL-based execution engine? After all, we have the best standards-based process execution engine on the planet. People loved it. And there’s clearly a need for execution engines.

The answer is that we have the skills and capabilities to do more for developers, business analysts and end users. Doing more means creating a complete, integrated, affordable and open BPM system that allows businesses to create the next generation of process applications. And while there are plenty of other BPMSs, we knew we could innovate in ways that speak directly and uniquely to the extended development team. (Just wait until you see what’s in ActiveVOS 7.0, slated for release in September. We think it’s going to blow you away.)

We also know that when application development technology is about to cycle to the “next thing,” it’s a big deal. It can mean upheaval. Developers are sometimes forced to leave their comfort zones, end users begin demanding more because they’ve heard about the next wave and the business expects newer technology to cost less and do more.

Everyone knows about the side-effects of changing technology. But what most people can’t tell you is when, exactly, change is about to happen. We can all look in the rear-view mirror and see when client-server replaced mainframe app dev. But what do you see right now out the front window of your car? Can you tell what’s next? Do you see it way far in the distance?

It’s a crucial question for us, because being a startup means we must out-innovate our competitors. We need to see what’s on the road because our competitors claim to own the road you are looking at through the front window of the car. So, we have to innovate in ways that minimize disruption and which don’t leave anyone behind.

What do we see when we look down that road? We’re convinced that business process management is the next technology cycle in application development. And that it’s happening now.

That’s why we were so gratified to read Forrester’s new TechRadar on BPMS (subscription to Forrester Research is required to read more than the abstract linked to here). Forrester’s report clearly documents that the shift to BPMS has begun. If you obtain the report, you will see that large percentages of companies that Forrester talked to are now actively using BPMS or thinking about how to begin. As Forrester says in the abstract, “Enterprises face increased demands for improvements in business agility; BPM tools can remove many of the barriers to success.”

We are excited that the BPM market has begun to accelerate. And we are also pleased to be acknowledged by Forrester’s analysts to be in that marketplace. Our message to the development and business analyst community echoes Forrester’s: BPMS is a huge opportunity to suceed at improving your business operations. We can recommend three things to you. Learn about BPMS (ideally, using ActiveVOS and our extensive, free educational materials in a free, supported trial).  Implement now on a project basis to gain experience. And, think very carefully about the costs of staying behind.

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Be sure to read the new Forrester TechRadar on BPMS

I’ve been itching to write and simultaneously dreading writing this post for the last 48 hours. That’s because I know that whatever I say about Oracle 11g, and in particular, Oracle SOA Suite, will be perceived by our readers — with some justification — as hopelessly biased. After all, ActiveVOS is the primary competitor to SOA Suite, and it’s my job to make that clear to anyone interested in BPM. Many will expect only self-serving commentary. Still, there will be lots of talk about 11g and we certainly have an interest in its impact on the marketplace.

What may not be so obvious is that despite the perceived bias, I really do want to try to get beyond our obvious self-interest to communicate something even more important, which is less about ActiveVOS than about the difference between what a vendor with a new mega-release says and what it would mean to actually use the system.

In a nutshell, Oracle didn’t pull it off.

Let me explain.

I attended an 11g and SOA Suite launch seminar this week. Oracle drew a good audience from among its current customers. And, in a positive leading indicator, a majority of the customers were interested in SOA Suite, primarily for business process management.

Between the keynote and the SOA Suite breakout, I counted over 150 PowerPoint slides. Endlessly repeated claims of being “unified,” and “#1 in the market,” and “placed in the ‘leaders’ quadrant’” by every analyst on the planet. Screenshots and Shockwave (Shockwave??!!) demos of bits and pieces of products. (The Shockwave demos failed, if you can believe it. The demon of all software companies that trashes demos lives on…)

Their message? In 11g and in SOA Suite, Oracle has achieved the incomprehensible: a unification of dozens of acquisitions into a single coherent, “unified, hot-pluggable, standards-based” whole that can be easily implemented and used.

What’s amazing about this — and what I know you’d have seen too if you were in the room — isn’t that people doubt this claim…it’s that they are so overwhelmed by the opposite reality as demonstrated by Oracle’s presentation that they just didn’t know what to think. The audience was so inundated by bits and pieces of this or that product that were obviously silos that they were, literally, dumbstruck. They were speechless…and not from epiphany.

I  was astonished that at the end of the SOA Suite breakout, there wasn’t a single question asked by customers. Partly embarrassed for Oracle by the silence, I asked a question and an industry analyst asked a question. That was it. After 70 slides — with no live product demo — and 90 minutes of saying all the right things, not a word. No discussion. No buzz. People just didn’t know what to think.

If after millions of hours of development, billions of dollars in acquisitions and a deluge of PowerPoint slides hewing to fashion — “We’ve got CEP! We’ve got BPMN 2.0! We’ll migrate you to 11g automatically! We’ll run BPEL and BPMN 2.0 natively, side-by-side and models can share metadata! JDeveloper is the tool to use! We support development in Eclipse! We have SCA!” — you just can’t figure out how your organization could be successful quickly and easily with all this, there’s a problem. If after all this, you haven’t got a question you could ask in public — if there wasn’t one thing you wanted to clarify for yourself —  there’s a big, big problem.

And that problem is the customers in the room just couldn’t picture themselves being successful with SOA Suite. Despite all the talk about “unified” it was embarrassingly clear that 11g is a “product” only its legions of product managers and engineers could love.

It’s like the runway model pictured above. He’s wearing the right color (black, of course). And he looks like a model with that pouty expression. But that hairdo! It just doesn’t work. Apparently, the designer looked around the fashion world, bought up everything he could, spent a long time laboring over the costume, then trotted it out on the catwalk to shocked silence as everyone in the room realized that the pieces — the pants, the shirt, the hairdo — just don’t work together.

Update October 20, 2009: See what we’ve done to make people aware of the size and bloat of Oracle SOA Suite here, here and here.

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On the software runway, Oracle SOA Suite 11g can’t quite pull it off

There are three files attached to this post. First, an iPod-formatted .m4v file that’s approximately 140MB in size. Subscribers to the VOSibilities podcast feed (search on “vosibilities” in the iTunes Store) will automatically receive this file. Also available are a DivX-encoded .avi file (about 375MB) and the slides that were presented as a PDF.

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VOSibilities podcast #36: The Naval Research Laboratory on SOA-based process orchestration

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Butler Group reports on ActiveVOS

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Naval Research Lab to present webinar on orchestration

Reference is made to a sample application that will be available for users to download and try. Please check back here frequently; we will post a link to that demo application as soon as it is available.

As is our custom, we have posted two versions of the replay. The first (which is also in our podcast feed) is an iPod-formatted .m4v file and is approximately 170MB is size. The second is a larger (365MB) DivX-encoded .avi.

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VOSibilities podcast #35: Breaking the IT bottleneck with ActiveVOS and rPath

• SCA forces a dependence on development tools.

No. As we were working on the standard, we primarily talked about the development experience for a developer who is just using a text editor. We did this because we understood that you can’t make fundamentally complex technology simple by creating layers of development tools. The place where that approach usually falls apart is in debugging – especially debugging after deployment. If a technology is truly simple, as SCA strives to be, then it should be possible to create it in a text editor.  Tooling still can be useful, but just as a productivity accelerator.

• SCA discourages the creation of well designed service contracts.

Not true.  A WSDL-first approach can and should be used, but not as the only way to define reusable code. Developers with SCA are encouraged to distinguish the software that will used and reused locally within an application from the services that will be exposed remotely. This way developers can concentrate their attention on creating evolvable, loosely-coupled coarse-grained services. Early versions of J2EE made the mistake of saying that all EJBs must be remotable, which resulted in the creation of tightly-coupled, fine-grained components that could never really be reused enterprise-wide.  We learned from that mistake.

• SCA is big (as implied by the comment about the gigabytes of Oracle code).

Check out the Fabric3 SCA runtime.  The download for the stand-alone server is 10 MB. Yes, Oracle includes SCA in a package with all the other middleware they’ve ever created, but that really isn’t the design center for SCA. It was designed to allow for small, simple runtimes. Some people have criticized us for not building on top of JavaEE standards, but that was done on purpose. We don’t want SCA to be just one more thing that has to be learned in addition to everything else that developers currently have to learn. It is intended to be the smallest amount of technology necessary to build a service-based application.

• SCA has too many moving parts

Actually, creating an application with SCA generally results in fewer artifacts than developing the application with Java technologies (JAX-WS or SpringWS). This is especially true when you use SCA and BPEL together, since BPEL code declares constructs using XML Schema and WSDL port types directly. If you use either JAX-WS or SpringWS, you end up creating Java classes for every XML element in every document used by a service.  This can result in hundreds of classes, each a separate artifact that has to be managed.

• BPEL 2.0 is in its infancy

JP included this criticism as the reason why it cannot be yet be trusted. BPEL is related to SCA, since SCA encourages the creation of services using BPEL.

Actually, BPEL 2.0 has been out since April of 2007 and people have been successfully creating service-oriented applications with it ever since. More recently, with the advent of BPEL4People and WS-HumanTasks, more and more developers are finding that the standard works very well for more traditional workflow scenarios. It is also the best standard to invest in, since XPDL is so loose that portability between tools using the standard is very weak.

Take a closer look

I believe that SCA is a key new technology that will help people achieve the very goals that JP is striving for: greater simplicity, better service design, higher productivity and less dependence on large software stacks. I hope that JP, and anyone else who is interested in these goals, takes the time to take a closer look at the technology. However, reading the specifications might not be the best way to get an understanding of the technology and how it can fit into an organization. May I recommend a book? 

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Dispelling a few misconceptions about SCA

On Thursday, 16 July at 2pm ET, Active Endpoints and rPath are presenting a joint webinar that will show how  a BPMS can be combined with advanced deployment technology to speed application deployment and reduce costs. We hope you will join us at 2pm ET, Thursday, 16 July for a fascinating walk-through of a solution to this complex problem.

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Webinar: Automating application deployment

In a podcast we recorded last week,  Luc Clément — our product manager — mentioned in passing that we were about to post a new sample that describes in detail how to actually implement a human task in a business process.

Since we can’t post a link easily inside the podcast — and this sample is really something anyone considering a BPMS should see — I wanted to make sure to point out that the sample is now available here. If you want a trial download of ActiveVOS to walk through the sample in, please download it here.

ActiveVOS has become very popular among BPM users because it makes it easy to include human tasks in larger business processes. It’s obvious, of course, that no business process application would be complete without integrated human tasks. What’s been missing is a complete, standards-based way to combine automated and human tasks into a process as well as a standardized way to expose the work item list to real people. ActiveVOS’s standards-based implementation (using both BPEL4People and WS-Human Task) is detailed in this sample, which we recommend to anyone considering a BPM implementation.

You can work through the sample at your leisure. It’s a great way to learn how human tasks and processes work together in a modern BPMS. The sample is also a marked contrast to yesterday’s separate workflow systems which must be manually integrated with automated systems and which vary widely in the way the tasks are delivered to end users.

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Human task, meet computer. Both of you, meet happy development team