VOSibilities

Yeah, baby! Ain’t nuthin’ like a good blog war-o-words. And a juicy one has just broken out between two influential voices: Nick Malik and Bruce Silver. And I suspect we haven’t seen the last of it. (At least I hope we haven’t. July is a slow month; we could use some American Gladiators-style trash talkin’ right about now.)

Apparently, Nick found the top dead center of the button you shouldn’t push in Bruce’s mind: he says BPM is never going to live up to expectations that non-developers will create applications.

In reply, Bruce — slappin’ Nick right upside the head – replies that Nick has to “prove” his assertion by showing that someone — anyone — in the “BPM community” has made a claim that modeling leads directly to completed applications.

While I hope the histrionics continue, this is really nothing more than two purists trying to keep their rivers from converging.  (I gotta admit that I find these near-screaming matches to be more educational than so-called “polite debate” for the very simple reason that they strip out the fluff in favor of direct frontal attacks everyone can understand.)

We all know from long, bitter experience that the “third rail” in the Microsoft world (touch it and die) is developers. MSFT will do what it takes to keep developers tied to the Windows API. Anything that could loosen that death-grip is a danger, and that includes end users working in standards-based tools that could care less about the underlying OS.

And from what I’ve read about the “BPM community” there’s a fair bit of wishful thinking there, too. Bruce is probably correct that no responsible entity has claimed what he believes Nick is claiming. Yet, you don’t have to say the “E” (execution) word outright to lead people to the conclusion that your BPMS does it directly from pretty pictures. Go ahead, spend five minutes on Lombardi’s site and tell me you don’t see it there.

What do we care? Well, let me be the first to pre-announce our upcoming ActiveVOS release, scheduled for mid-August, in which we actually converge the rivers. We will have the most complete BPMN modeling capabilities and, of course, we have the world’s best and most complete BPEL deployment, execution and management system.

ActiveVOS will make it possible for business users to come very, very close to execution via BPMN. And we believe that developers will take that non-executable model and “finish” it in a 100%-standards-based environment that frees them and their businesses from .NetJail.

Forgive me the nested platitude, but the issue boils down to that old saw that says, “Get the right tool for the job.” Developers need modern, standards-based languages that execute on the metal; business analysts need modern, standards-based ways to describe what systems have to accomplish. Being doctrinaire about which is the “correct” way to serve business and IT is beside the point.

So, while it’s fun to see the purists bloody each other, we intend to deliver an implementable, cost-effective and complete way to achieve what neither side really seems to want. And that, dear readers, is what a visual orchestration system is all about.

Last week, David Linthicum’s SOA podcast continued a theme he’s been on lately, a discussion of BPEL’s “fallings” [sic]. I think he meant failings…but in any event, he mentions several times in the podcast that a post he’d previously written on this topic had generated quite a discussion (it did) and feedback from unnamed “BPEL vendors” (that’d be us; I can’t imagine why he didn’t name us. (-: )

Anyway, today after I heard the podcast, I asked Chris Keller, our founder and vp of development and one of the most knowledgeable people on BPEL in the world for his feedback. Chris has not only written the BPEL engine that’s at the core of our visual orchestration system (a VOS is a whole lot more than a BPEL engine), he’s active on the OASIS committees that are furthering the standards.

Chris gave me a lot of food for thought, and being in a playful mood, I thought it might be fun to that feedback into a Q&A. Sorta like a game show, with Mr. Linthicum as the contestant. The prize, for correct answers, is a free ActiveVOS license. Let’s see how Mr. Linthicum does…

Question 1: In the podcast, David says that a major problem with BPEL is that it’s synchronous.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out… Then click here to read the correct answer
Sorry, no. Chris points out that the exact opposite is true. BPEL is asynchronous by definition.

Question 2: David says BPEL has a few programmer-level issues including limitations around request/reply exchanges in a heterogeneous architecture.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Whooppss…wrong again. Chris points out that this isn’t a problem with BPEL as much as it is a problem with vendor support for standards that make request-response asynchronous, like reliable messaging. It’s one prime reasons for the WS-TF standards effort.

Question 3: David says BPEL has issues with failure recovery, exception handling and multi-programming model support.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
So very sorry. Chris points that exception handling is covered by the specifications and that recovery isn’t something that belongs in the specification at all (This is a major differentiator among vendors, and something ActiveVOS does brilliantly — ed.). As for multi-programming model support, we aren’t quite sure what David means, but if he’s talking about multi-tasking, the spec has that covered, too.

Question 4: David says BPEL is not very good at adding a human as part of the process and as SOA moves forward, he’s finding that composites and workflows are more applicable than simple service binding and extending.
Did David get it right? Click the arrow to find out…Then click here to read the correct answer
Close…but no cigar. Chris points WS-HT and BPEL4People have been added to the specification for precisely this purpose. While David’s criticism was once correct, it’s not applicable today.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed our little episode of The BPEL Game Show. And sorry, David, but you didn’t win our prize. However, anytime you’d like to be brought up-to-date on why BPEL is at the heart of SOA development, we’re happy to update you so you can win the next time.

We are pleased to present a recording of a joint webinar we presented on June 12, 2008 with XAware entitled How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications.

Despite the imposing title, I think you will find the content — especially the lively Q&A at the end of the webinar — very interesting.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #10: Webinar replay - How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications [80:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (278)
 VOSibilities podcast #10: Webinar replay - How to Create and Orchestrate Services for Your SOA and Web 2.0 Applications [80:19m]: Download (115)

I checked Wikipedia to see what a “sapphire” really is because I wondered if SAP’s SAPPHIRE trade show was using it as a pun on its company name and the “clarity” of a sapphire. Turns out it might be, since Wikipedia defines it as a mineral that’s not red. Unfortunately, the recent SAPPHIRE I attended has me seeing red.

Check out this slide from their announcement of their “BPM” products:

Once past the initial hype, what SAP claims to be bringing to market seems to be more hope than code. What bothered me the most are their claims of an “executable” business process model and that “immediate execution” speeds time to value. Hold on there…even if you did execute the model directly, is that necessarily a good thing?

Surely SAP isn’t suggesting that all of a sudden, you’re going to stop following best practices and the SDLC that you have developed over the years: separation of concern from the model, its implementation, testing, and methodical deployment across development, sit/cit and pre-production environments before you put it in production.

Beyond the question of what the right thing to do is in terms of development process, what exactly did SAP announce? A beta of BPM/BRM that will be released this June with the actual product shipping — maybe — in March 2009. (We’re hearing it’s $4500 per seat. Get that special checkbook you use for SAP products ready…you know the one with eight zeros pre-printed in the amount field.)

When it ships next March, there will be no announced integration with BPEL and no means of import/export of the BPMN from the tool that SAP customers have largely adopted, ARIS.

We talked with ARIS customers who aren’t happy about the lack of integration. One we spoke with uses ARIS heavily to model processes and hand them over to development. Instead, SAP chose to generate executable code directly bypassing the developer. If you believe SAP, you’ve now empowered your business analysts with the means to build executable models.

The good news is that you now have 300 new developers; the bad news is that you have 300 new developers. Is there an IT group on the planet that would deploy such a model in production directly? Please let us know if you do…we want to see how you’ve managed to skip validation, testing, performance trials and all the rest of the standard things a real application has to have.

SAP indicated that interoperability with ARIS is not possible because of a lack of a standard for BPMN serialization. While that’s true — BPMN is a notation (i.e. not an executable process definition like BPEL) — not having import/export with ARIS only suggests SAP is more interested in account control than real BPM. If it was motivated in ensuring no lock-in, SAP would have worked more closely with ARIS in developing an import/export mechanism, maybe via XPDL or XMI. But they haven’t, and while we’re only speculating, it seems clear why they haven’t. So much for the claims by ARIS at SAPPHIRE that ARIS is the “Business Processing Arm of SAP”.

See why does this have us seeing red? We’re steaming for the SAP customers who actually buy this line…who’ll be waiting a year (at best) for capabilities they need today…who’ll end up even more locked-in than ever to proprietary, closed, non-standards-compliant applications.

In a recent post, David Linthicum asks if BPEL is irrelevant. And just as David predicts BPEL providers would do, we fundamentally disagree with the premise. In fact, we don’t see how you could create an SOA without BPEL.

As I read the post it seems he has two sets objections. First, a lack of integration of people into processes and second, a collection of concerns about recovery and exception handling.

ActiveVOS is the first development system that’s based on BPEL 2.0 with no proprietary extensions and to include BPEL4People. As a result, it’s the only 100% standards-based way to achieve long-running orchestrations that include human tasks as first-class participants in the orchestrations.

And if you want recovery and error handling, how’s this: what if you could, in a running orchestration, dynamically switch endpoints when the primary wasn’t available? What if you could change what a running orchestration does based on the current state of the overall business process? IOW, if you could determine that processes that included human tasks had problems with the quality of the work and as a result you could dynamically change what happens to in-flight orchestrations? What if you could, very simply, suspend a failed transaction — one that might have been running for weeks or even months — so that corrective action could be taken? What if you could easily version processes so that in-flight orchestrations could conclude before a new process is implemented?

These are just some of the things that ActiveVOS does that we believe are part and parcel of creating applications in a services-based environment and for which there are no real substitutes. BPMN ain’t gonna do all this (it’s not even executable). AJAX and most Web 2.0 technologies are primarily front-of-screen and do nothing to manage the amazing complexities of long-running orchestrations made up of heterogeneous services.

David, don’t pull that trigger until you talk with us. We’re happy to show you (and anyone else) all this and more, anytime, anywhere. I think you’ll come away with a completely different perception.

For this episode of our podcast, I am very pleased to bring you a video recording made by our own Kim Pease in which she demonstrates ActiveVOS’s capabilities to interact with JMS queues. Kim gives a great overview of what you can do with ActiveVOS, but even more than that, the features she demonstrates make a very subtle but important point: orchestration developers don’t live in a 100% SOAP world.

Many of the services developers need to orchestrate are available via JMS and originate and terminate in common systems like MQ Series and JBoss. We believe it’s very important to be inclusive of these transports and to make sure they are able to participate in a first-class way with SOAP-transported services. In short, being “doctrinaire” about how services should communicate with the orchestration system only serves to impede developers who deal with heterogeneous systems as a daily matter of course. A good example of this pragmatism in ActiveVOS is at about 6:00 into the demo when Kim shows how ActiveVOS will automatically detect an incoming message’s format and reply in kind.

I want to thank you all for the feedback we’ve been receiving about this podcast series. We will continue to post a wide variety of content: demo vignettes (help me persuade Kim and our other engineers to burn the midnight oil to create more by downloading and viewing this episode like crazy), product information, audio podcasts and PDF content. Be sure to subscribe to this feed at http://www.vosibilities.com/category/podcast/feed or in iTunes at http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=274122495.

You may have also noticed that when we have video for the feed, I try to post both a larger .avi and an iPod-formatted .m4v or .mp4. They are always the same content, but the .m4v is usually smaller because it’s reduced in resolution to fit iPods. Please feel free to download either or both. Also, as a convenience who visit the blog instead of subscribing to the podcast feed, the .m4v can be played in a Flash player on the blog just by clicking on the image.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #8- Kim Pease on using JMS with MQ Series and JBoss to orchestrate web services [9:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (258)
 VOSibilities podcast #8- Kim Pease on using JMS with MQ Series and JBoss to orchestrate web services [9:54m]: Download (56)

Well, I’m back from the long Memorial Day weekend (the weather here in the Boston area was spectacular for this traditional start-of-summer holiday). It was great to be offline for a few days, and this morning — like millions of other people just back into the office —  I’ve been plowing through the astonishing amount of email I collected over the long holiday.

In doing so, I came across an email that’s so indicative of the pain and suffering that is inflicted on developers by enterprise software companies that it completely jolted me back into the reality of what we’re trying to accomplish here with ActiveVOS. Before I post this message in its entirety — I’ve only removed names to protect the identity of my colleague who sent me the message — please let me set the stage a little.

When we were at JavaOne, SAP announced it’s ushering in a “new era in BPM“ (They can’t actually call it a product because, according to the release, you can’t buy it until, at best, ”early 2009″). A colleague and I sat through a presentation and demo, if you can call it that, of the new capabilities. The SAP presenter wasn’t able to get his screenshot demo — no live code — into screen show mode in PowerPoint. (I guess he hasn’t been to the five-day SAP employee class Introduction to F5 in Microsoft PowerPoint yet.) It was one of the worst demos I’ve ever seen. Or, maybe, it was one of the best demos I’ve ever seen. Depends on your perspective.

A DVD was distributed, which my colleague — being more technical than I am — laid claim to. What follows are his emails to me from last week that I just read this morning: 

Okay, Alex, I’ve spent most of today trying to install the SAP NetWeaver product, and so far have had several failures on the install and am not sure how to proceed. I will continue searching their install forums and so on, and maybe trying other options in their install dialogs, but I am sick of blowing time on it.

How would you like me to proceed? Would you prefer I sent you up the DVD to let you play with it for a while? [Uh....no. - ed.] If you get it installed, you could send it back, and I could try again, but maybe you’d like to get your hands on it for a while. [Yeah, right...I want to sign up to be this frustrated. - ed.] Certainly, if you have as many troubles as I did, your blog entry could consist of documenting the install difficulties alone! [And here it is. - ed.]

I found recommendations on the SAP support forum for this installer to install the demo on a VM image instead of on your actual machine, because the install can fail and screw up your registry etc. The normal enterprise “I need to do this to run my mega-app, so get out of my way and let me do anything I want on your machine, and no, I don’t play well with others” crap… Of course, my machine isn’t really powerful enough to install to a VMWare image rather than my machine, so I haven’t tried that path. Besides, I have several partially completed installs already started on my machine, so it isn’t clean any more anyway.

Then, a day later, this update:

As expected, when I came in today, the SAP installer I left up overnight was still reporting it was processing step 18 of 30 install steps. I also notice a performance issue on my machine now – I’ve stopped any autostart services SAP installed, but I have to go through and thoroughly cleanse my machine from their shite as well. I still have the DVD – I might try again over the next week or so to do the install, but it is not top of my list… 

Rightfully so. I can’t imagine it’d be at the top of any developer’s list of things to do. From the concept, to the “demo” to the user’s out-of-box experience, it’s becoming pretty clear that SAP’s BPM initiative started with wheels that have some real issues, like not being round.

I’ve been waiting to post this video podcast episode for a couple of weeks because I wanted to understand better all the vitriol and confusion in the marketplace between BPMN promoters on one side and BPEL proponents on the other

No less an authority than Bruce Silver noted over two years ago “…that the world of BPMS is divided into BPEL-lovers and BPEL-haters…” And as soon as I arrived at Active Endpoints last January, I could really feel the tension…an internecine battle among people who believe in the same outcome and passionately hold that standards-based technology is ultimately the correct path for customers.

But at the end of the day, there are two inescapable facts. First, BPMN is not executable. BPEL is. Together, they are a more potent, winning combination for customers than peanut butter and jelly. I just can’t understand why BPMN promoters skip over this fact.

This BPMN-bigot blind-spot this allows Lombardi, SAP and others to claim ”support” for standards and yet execute the processes on a proprietary execution engine. Isn’t that the maximum possible deprecation of BPMN? Isn’t it a violation of the original intent of BPMN to run it on proprietary engines, ensuring customers lose agility and increasing their costs? Why don’t BPMN people just loathe that idea?

We do, and that’s the second inescapable fact: no modelling-direct-to-execution technology has ever succeeded. That’s why BPEL4People is so important (and why we are on the BPEL4People Technical Committee and have implemented the current capabilities of BPEL4People in ActiveVOS 5).

It’s really pretty simple (and here comes a mixed metaphor I can’t believe I’m posting): dolphins don’t talk but old dogs can be taught new tricks. Dolphins may actually be smarter than humans, but they don’t speak in words. BPMN may be great, but it won’t run “on the metal.” OTOH, BPEL can be extended with human activities that are first-class participants in a BPEL orchestration. That ole dog sure can hunt.

Bottom line: BPEL and BPMN together is what kumbaya sounds like for BPMS. And today’s podcast episode is a proof point: watch how Mark Ford shows an orchestration that includes human workflow as a first-class participant and which is 100% standards-based. (And watch for us to shortly say a whole lot more about ActiveVOS and BPMS.)

 

 VOSibilities podcast #6: Mark Ford on BPEL4People [2:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (250)

 

 VOSibilities podcast #6: Mark Ford on BPEL4People [2:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (32)

Whew…it’s been a busy week. We were at JavaOne, threw a great party (pix soon, I promise), met lots of people and got lots of great feedback.

Oh, and speaking of parties, we crashed SAPPHIRE in Orlando. Yes, it was we who dressed up actors in prison uniforms labelled “SAP County Jail” on the back and had the actors hand out ActiveVOS demo CD’s labelled “SAP Liberation Plan” and “Evidence” during SAP’s big user convention last week.

Why? In two words: public service. SAP bigots may think that’s an over-the-top characterization of what they will label as a PR stunt. But there is a method to our madness. We are convinced that SAP is pulling the wool over users’ eyes about BPM. And while we are realistic about our chances of liberating today’s SAP users, we feel compelled to reach out to them just in case they want a get-out-of-proprietary-BPM-jail plan.

What am I talking about? Consider this interview with an SAP architect who says:

SAP NetWeaver already provides capabilities to model and execute business processes that include both automated activities as well as human-executed activities. As the BPEL4People standardization progresses we will presumably see more and more compliant implementations.

Isn’t it clever to conflate NetWeaver — the most closed, proprietary BPMS on the planet — with BPEL4People? If you can just get a little of that standards-based branding onto your proprietary platform (especially in an press interview about standards), it may be enough to keep the prisoners in lock-down and maybe even bring a new busload or two inside the gates.

By “…we will presumably see more and more compliant implementations” I presume SAP was referring to the announcement last week of SAP’s plans for BPM, in which they purport to “usher in a new era” in BPM. The interview was published before the press release was issued, but if this is what she was referring to, it looks like NetWeaver users looking to free their business processes from proprietary stacks have just had their jail sentences unilaterally extended.

Consider three points. FIrst, there’s not a single standard mentioned in this press release. That’s not ushering in a new era. That’s 1980 all over again. Second, notice the repeated use of the phrase “the planned implementation.” This is all about some SAP NetWeaver product you can’t actually get until Q1 2009. Can you say, “freeze-dry the prisoners until we’re ready?” Third, I fell asleep during a demo of this at JavaOne in which the demoer couldn’t even get a PowerPoint to work.

‘Nuff said (for now). Be sure to watch the hilarious video of our “prisoners” being harassed in Orlando as they attempt to hand out CD’s to arriving guests. We didn’t go inside the hall. We didn’t interfere with anyone…but SAP set the security people on us anyway. Guess a little standards-based competition is too much for the self-proclaimed ushers of a new era.

 

 Video of Active Endpoints attempting to liberate SAP users at SAPPHIRE [2:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (314)

We are pleased to offer our first audio podcast. Until now, we’ve used our podcast feed to offer videos, webinar replays and news about Active Endpoints in PDF form.

Now, we are going to a more “classic” use of our podcast feed by providing audio interviews with the people inside Active Endpoints who are driving our product and market efforts. I hope to offer regular podcasts that span the gamut of topics: from marketing to technology with everything in between.

Enjoy this inaugural episode with Chris Keller, a founder of Active Endpoints, who I stuck in the “Wayback Machine” and asked a couple of tough historical questions. First, “Why BPEL”? And second, “What lead to the requirement for BPEL4People and WS-Human Task”?

 

 VOSibilities podcast #4: Chris Keller on Active Endpoints, BPEL and BPEL4People [14:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (132)

View a recording of the April 17, 2008 webinar BPEL Basics for Java Developers, presented by Active Endpoints’ Ron Romano and Alex Neihaus. This webinar was extraordinarily well-received and offers Java developers a conceptual introduction to SOA-based service orchestration using familar concepts.

There are two files in this post. The first file is formatted for an iPod and can be viewed here on the blog. Please be patient while the podcast downloads into the player. It is also available in our podcast feed (search on “vosibilities” in the iTunes Store to subscribe).

The second, a DivX-encoded AVI file, is significantly larger in size (@460MB) and can be downloaded for more comfortable viewing.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #3: BPEL Basics for Java Developers webinar April 17 2008 (iPod format) [91:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (614)
 VOSibilities podcast #3: BPEL Basics for Java Developers webinar April 17 2008 (DivX-encoded AVI) [91:49m]: Download (379)

Please join us for an informative webinar on April 17 entitled BPEL Basics for Java Developers. Register here.

This informative webinar will help you expand your Java knowledge to acquire an understanding of the basics of BPEL. A high-level overview of BPEL and its importance in a web-services environment will be presented, along with a brief discussion of the basic BPEL activities and how they relate to Java concepts. The following topics will be covered:
• Parsing the Language of SOA with Java as a guide
• Breaking out of the VM: evolving from RPC to Web Services
• BPEL Activities - Receive, Reply, Invoke • BPEL Facilities - Fault Handling and Compensation (“Undo”)

We hope you can join us.

Try as I might, I can’t find a single line of source code in the download of Intalio’s Community Edition ”open source BPMS.” Imagine my surprise at this considering they have been claiming open source leadership for years. They even call themselves “the leading Open Source BPMS company.” Sure, you can find source code for individual piece parts if you go to another website and find it as part of Intalio’s donations to open source projects, but here I am talking about their claims of open source leadership in regards to their Community Edition product.

Because of the complexity of enterprise software, I believe software companies have to hold themselves to a higher level of “truth in labelling.” We don’t like it when toothpaste has antifreeze in it. And I don’t like it when an purportedly open source product has no source and licensing restrictions that sound like they were written in Redmond or Walldorf.

It may be simplistic but calling something “open source” means you get source code. While Sandy Kemsley finds it amusing when I quote Wikipedia, the simple fact is that Wikipedia’s definition of FOSS says open source allows users to “…study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code” (emphasis mine). To call yourself the “open source leader” and to launch an “open source service” (whatever that is) means you should conform to the conventional definition of what FOSS is. And that ain’t what Intalio is doing, near as I can tell.

I was recently fact-checking an upcoming analyst report on BPMS in which the author mentioned in passing that Intalio didn’t actually include source in its Community Edition downloads. I was dumbfounded (and more than a little miffed that these analysts could so blithely give these guys a pass on so fundamental a point).

Incredulous, I asked our product management people to take a look. As willing as I am to call Intalio out for misleading users about its Community Edition, I am still not willing to cut and paste the heated analysis I got back from the product managers. So, let me try to summarize:

• As far as we can tell, the license included with their product includes the restriction that users may not “…decompile, disassemble, or otherwise reverse engineer or attempt to reconstruct or discover any source code or underlying ideas or algorithms of the Intalio Software by any means whatsoever…” (again, emphasis mine)
• As far back as 2006, Intalio was happy allow confusion between “open source-like” and real open source in its licensing to morph into “open source leadership.” (Here, you have to knock Gartner for not being more consistent and giving Intalio the room to claim open source street cred undeservedly.)
• At the end of the day, Intalio’s claim of an open source mantle isn’t about standards or FOSS, it’s about its sales model.

It’s that last point that I really object to. It’s OK to be proprietary. It’s OK not to ship the source code. What’s not OK is to use the terminology of standards and open source to confuse users for the (very legitimate) purpose of driving sales. That’s just misleading.

Anne Thomas Mannes of the Burton Group has recently written a post that sums up what I believe is the missing in the discussion of SOA and BPM: the enormous challenge in getting line-of-business developer teams to use these techniques.

Anne writes:

I’ve talked to many companies that have implemented stunningly beautiful SOA infrastructures that support managed communications using virtualized proxies and dynamic bindings. They’ve deployed the best technology the industry has to offer — including registries, repositories, SOA management, XML gateways, and even the occasional ESB. Many have set up knowledge bases, best practices, guidance frameworks, and governance processes. And yet these SOA initiatives invariably stall out. The techies just can’t sell SOA to the business. They have yet to demonstrate how all this infrastructure yields any business value.

More to the point, the techies have not been able to explain to the business units why they should adopt a better attitude about sharing and collaboration–which is the fundamental cultural shift required for SOA to succeed. The pervasive attitude is “What’s in it for me?” As one of my interviewees said, “Altruism is not an enterprise strategy”.

Many Americans will remember former President Clinton’s famous prescription for political success in the 1992 presidential campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” In a single sound bite, Clinton moved beyond technical discussions of monetary and fiscal policy to the heart of the matter: people cared then, as now in a period of economic turmoil, about bread-and-butter issues.

The challenge of SOA and BPM in business today is that it’s all been high-falutin’ theory. And lots — lots — of money spent on piece parts that look good on architecture diagrams but which are unimplementable by mere mortals in line of business development project teams.

It’s no wonder these “stunningly beautiful SOA infrastructures” cannot be “sold” to the business. By themselves, they do do nothing. Squat, nichts, nada. It takes developers to make these investments pay back for the business and those guys are too smart to sign up for science projects when they get paid to do business applications.

Those who care about SOA and BPM and making it real should take Anne’s advice and stop navel-gazing at their lovely accomplishments. The discussion needs to turn to how to enable real developers to use SOA effectively.

To anyone reading this blog, it’ll come as no surprise that we are quite sure we have the answer. That’s why we created a new category, the visual orchestration system, and a new product, ActiveVOS, specifically for line of business application developers.

It’s a tall claim, but we have the stuff to prove it. (It’s also why we took the unusual step of putting a top-level menu on our new website called “Proof“.) ActiveVOS is all about the application, stupid. And it’s about ending the habit of peeling money off the roll simply to build beautiful architectures nobody can use.

One of the reasons I really enjoy working with application development software so much is the vitality of the online community. My recent post reacting to what I perceived as a dismissal of BPEL4People generated both responses and traffic for this, our brand spankin’ new blog. Unlike other technology areas, app dev — and the SOA world in particular — is full of well-thought-through blogs and fascinating personalities. I appreciate readers who have taken the time to find us and who are interested in what we have to say.

And, as the newbie in this universe, I seem to have stepped into the middle of a BPMN versus BPEL discussion. My post was perceived by some as exactly that: one should pick BPEL or BPMN. It felt like I got into a religious war, with competing accolytes for each side doing that shout-over-the-wall-at-the-other-side thing.

I want to make sure we are clear about how we view BPEL and BPMN. Over this last weekend, I had an email discussion with Mark Taber, our CEO, which I’d like to paraphrase to make sure everyone understands what we think is important for customers who are trying to orchestrate services that include human tasks. In short,

• We understand people are adopting BPMN. It’s a standard…and our company is all about standards.
• Today, BPMN is being used mostly for notation..that’s OK, but unless it’s executable it’s not any more relevant to writing an application than Visio is.
• If you want you BPMN notations to be executable, today that means buying proprietary execution stacks, which lock up your business process logic better than a life sentence at Guantanamo Bay.
• BPMN is only going to be useful when you can output it to a standardized, open and executable language. Guess what: we think that’s BPEL.

So, far from dissin’ BPMN, we think it’s got it’s legs…but the legs are built of BPEL.

As a kid, I was fascinated by Etch-a-Sketch toys. But I gave it up when I realized that after hours and hours and hours of drawing, my artwork (if you could call it that) was locked into the toy. I couldn’t change it easily and one simple shake would destroy the entire picture. That analogy holds perfectly for BPMN without BPEL: you can etch-a-sketch all your business processes with it, but if you want to run it, the BPMN ends up inside some vendor’s proprietary execution stack.

What standards-based SOA implementation wants that?