VOSibilities

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.

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.

We are pleased to present a replay of a webinar we originally presented with rPath on July 16, 2009. This webinar is of particular interest to users who are responsible for deploying applications as it demonstrates a structured, well-thought-through set of technologies to deal with the technical and procedural issues of deploying applications today.

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.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #35: Breaking the IT bottleneck with ActiveVOS and rPath [63:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (536)
 VOSibilities podcast #35: Breaking the IT bottleneck with ActiveVOS and rPath [63:53m]: Download (582)

We are very pleased to announce that ActiveVOS has experienced record growth in Q2 of 2009.

Eine deutsche Version der Pressemitteilung ist auch beigefügt.

 ActiveVOS BPMS experiences record growth in Q2 2009: Download (485)
 Rekordwachstum im 2. Quartal für Active Endpoints: Download (257)

Today, Active Endpoints is pleased to announce the winners of the BPM in a Bottle contest, where entrants were asked to submit evidence which shows how they used their free, supported 30-day trial of the ActiveVOS business process management suite (BPMS) in the development of their own BPM applications. Prizes included two T-Mobile G1 smart phones and three Logitech Squeezebox Boom music network players.

Selected from hundreds of entries, the five winners were chosen based on creativity and quality of work for their BPM applications and concepts. Congratulations to the winners!

Winners of the smart phone:

Kenneth Peeples, company undisclosed, Senior SOA Software Engineer

J.D. Baker, BAE Systems, Principal Systems Engineer

Winners of the music network player:

Susan Fox, company undisclosed, Product Manager

Michelle Crow, CMR – Complete Medical Record, Business Analyst

Denis Gagné, Trisotech

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I am joined by Luc Clément, senior director of product management and Michael Rowley, director of technology and strategy, for a discussion of our latest release, ActiveVOS 6.2. This release of the ActiveVOS BPMS introduces MultiSite and makes ActiveVOS the first BPM system that can extend business process management applications across geographically separated data centers. Luc and Michael discuss the benefits and implementation details of MultiSite.

You might also be interested in reviewing our podcast from March, 2009 on ActiveVOS 6.1.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #30: ActiveVOS 6.2 [21:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1929)

I attended the Gartner BPM Summit last week in San Diego. It was gratifying to be among the growing cadre of true believers in what BPM can (and has) accomplished. Jim Sinur of Gartner has a nice description of the conference here.

Yet from our perspective, there’s still a bit of drama to be resolved in the definition of what BPM is (thus the title of this post, which borrows from a daytime TV soap opera).

More than one presentation I attended showed BPMS technology as a set of interlocking gears. Depending on the speaker’s definition, a good BPM suite includes workflow, BI and BAM, content management and middleware. Everyone agrees BPMSs are model-based. And everyone agrees that at the heart of the BPMS – the central gear – is an execution engine.

But the real BPMS drama centers on what, precisely, makes this gear turn — and not incidentally, what this gear is “made of.” Unfortunately, some of the BPM foot soldiers I talked with at the BPM Summit tend to ignore this central gear — the BPM execution engine — as an afterthought. They seem to be saying, “As long as the process runs, who cares what it runs on?”

To us, that thinking is both a quixotic quest to rid BPM of IT pesky developers and a recipe that allows IT to make BPM just another unintegrated island of computing in the enterprise. BPM practitioners have to remember their IT history: every single technology that’s come along that attempts to “cut out” IT — and especially developers — has eventually been relegated to a minor role in the larger picture. We know for a fact that the ideal of business end users diagramming their processes, punching a button and having those BPM applications integrate with other systems, automatically deploy and run reliably without IT in the loop is simply a pipe dream.

For BPM to succeed, the question of how IT will integrate BPMS technologies, how developers will be able to combine BPM applications with other systems and whether or not the execution engine is proprietary are all critical questions. (And of course, we think ActiveVOS answers those questions beautifully.)

It would have been impossible to attend the BPM Summit and not come away excited about BPMS technology. I just hope that the BPM thought leaders who attended the BPM Summit don’t succumb to the pipe dream of building enterprise systems with “pretty pictures.”

Today, Active Endpoints announced that well-known government and industry SOA consultant Seros has made ActiveVOS the centerpiece of its offerings. Read the details in the press release attached to this post.

 Active Endpoints Announces Partnership with Seros: Download (555)

This week, WSO2 announced its “Carbon” technology, including a new “business process server.” Some have suggested that we should welcome another BPEL-based BPM server into the market as it demonstrates that the market for standards-based business process servers has grown large enough that new entrants see market-share opportunities.

Maybe another marketing guy might be happy to believe that..but not me. 

Two things bother me. First is the presumption that somehow “open source” solves the cost problem. Because IBM, Oracle and SAP cost millions, open source must be the answer, right?

Wrong. Consider that, in fact, WSO2’s announced pricing for their “BPM server” actually costs more than an ActiveVOS production server over three years. Nobody — and I mean nobody  – can build a business model on “free.”  Software companies have to pay people to survive and support customers. SOA middleware is complex stuff and whether you get a perpetual license and maintenance or open source with “subscription,” you have to pay somehow. The question is how much. And ActiveVOS has the best answer, bar none.

The second problem is the Achilles heel of the SOA and BPM world: the astonishingly misguided belief that customers want to build SOAs from piece parts. C’mon…let’s get past this. Java developers working on BPM want products — not little pieces of carbon-based coal they have to meld together into something resembling a development and deployment environment.

I’ve been at Active Endpoints for a year…and I am still astonished at the disconnect between vendors and customers over this. IBM’s, Oracle’s and, to a lesser extent, SAP’s strategy I understand. They bought and built stuff that was never designed to work together. They have to sell piece parts and make it seem like a virtue. But open source fans have transformed the mistakes of the monoliths into a purported benefit that delivers the same ultimate result: a dumping of middleware product engineering onto the end user developer who never gets to the real BPM application as a result.

What basis do I have to make this claim? It’s not me who says WSO2 Carbon isn’t a product. It’s none other than Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, who blogged that “Carbon isn’t a product.” Q.E.D.

So, in a spirit of fun — and as a public service to BPEL developers who might have open source stars in their eyes — here’s our top 10 list of frustrations with the WSO2 Carbon BPM server that “isn’t a product:”

10. No worklist support (Why would anyone need a worklist in a business process?)
9.   No clustering (Hey, it’s open source…why not just write it yourself? Clustering ain’t so complicated.)
8.   No reporting (Wanna know things about running business processes? Write it yourself…after you’ve engineered that clustering thing.) 
7.   No fixing of in-flight processes (Got a process that’s been running for a month and failed because the SMTP server was down? Go straight to BPM Jail, do not collect $200, lose your work and start again.)
6.   Rudimentary monitoring (Need to see what’s happened with a process? Check that log file and use mental gymnastics to match it up with the process definition.)
5.   Hand-editing WSDL’s to specify where the service is hosted (Miss Notepad very much? Haven’t used “localhost” enough? Wanna hard-code the hostname in the WSDL? This piece of Carbon’s for you…)
4.   Installation (Use Eclipse to check out BPEL designer plugins, then build it in one Eclipse workspace. From that workspace, kick off another copy of Eclipse, in a different workspace, that uses those plugins. And if something goes wrong? Rinse, lather, repeat.)
3.   Deployment (Have fun specifying how the services should be deployed by editing WSDL bindings directly. Of course, if you write something that isn’t supported by the engine, it will be valid WSDL…it just won’t deploy.)
2. BPMN modeling (Have some BPMN that you want to use to get started on that critical BPM app? Translate to BPEL by hand.)

And the number one thing you cannot do with the WSO2 Carbon BPM server-that-isn’t-a-product:

1. Include people (People in a business process…feh! Who needs ‘em anyway?)

You have to admit that the economic news these days has become truly frightening. In the US, joblessness has reached levels not seen in decades. Across the planet, governments are being forced to intervene in their economies in unprecedented ways.

But this isn’t a blog about economics. Instead, it’s a blog about a technology — business process management (BPM) — that allows enterprises to respond to these challenging times.

Jim Sinur of Gartner wrote this week about how customers’ perceptions of what BPM can accomplish for them today have changed from what they were just before the current economic upheaval. And to nobody’s surprise, the economic climate has pushed aside technical benefits in favor of bottom-line considerations like reducing costs and improving quality.

We have just one suggestion to add to the mix: think about saving big bucks in the BPM system itself.  Consider the costs of having to integrate multiple “stack” products to achieve a BPM application — having to build the car from a kit before you can drive it. Consider the costs of BPMN-only systems which cannot directly execute the application without being either proprietary or adding megabytes of hand-coded Java. Consider, finally, the costs of delay because your company simply cannot afford millions for a BPM system.

We like to think that ActiveVOS is the ideal product for these times: open, comprehensive, all-in-one, easy-to-learn and -deploy. But most of all, affordable. Maybe the silver lining in all this economic turmoil is that customers’ costly-is-better price prejudice with respect to BPM will dissolve on the alter of necessity and allow them to discover BPM that’s both better and less costly. That’s ActiveVOS. And it’s one reason we’ve recently displaced IBM at a giant European insurer and why we continue to gain market traction. Do yourself a favor: see if your BPM vendor posts its prices. We do, right here. We want you to know going in what a great system costs.

When your company is looking to BPM applications to save more pennies, it only makes sense that you would want to squeeze costs out of the BPM system itself. And it’s pretty clear that what Jim’s clients were thinking, too.

We are pleased to offer a recording of a webinar we delivered on January 21, 2009 in which we detailed some of the functionality included in a business process management (BPM) application that we have made available for Java developers as a learning tool. Written in ActiveVOS, the “Vintage Old Stock” application (get it….? The “VOS” BPM application?? (-: ) is available for developers who want to learn how to create BPM applications easily, afford ably and which are architecturally “correct” without additional effort.

We hope you enjoy the recordings and that you will take advantage of the fully-configured, supported trial version of ActiveVOS which includes the application for both learning and for use in your BPM applications. Many, many different techniques are demonstrated in this application, which we think makes it an excellent way to begin creating your own business process management applications.

There are many learning materials associated with the demo. This announcement gives you the best route through all off this exciting information and code. But, if you can’t wait to start, you begin with the customized ActiveVOS trial download.

There are two files enclosed in this post. The first, an iPod-formatted .m4v, which will be automatically provided to iTunes subscribers of our podcast feed, is about 144MB. The second, a DivX-encoded .avi, is about 476MB in size.

 

 VOSibilities podcast #26: Lifting the Hood on a BPM Application: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1392)
 VOSibilities podcast #26: Lifting the Hood on a BPM Application: Download (233)

This Wednesday, January 21, at Wednesday, January 21 at 2pm ET, 11am PT, 18:00 GMT, we will be presenting a free webinar (register here) in which we will “open the hood” and take a detailed look at a reference BPM and SOA application we call “Vintage Old Stock.” This webinar promises to be an excellent way for you to learn some of the latest techniques for creating BPM applications in a services-based environment.

Our ActiveVOS product manager, Mike Moniz, will detail how this fully featured business process was built using the latest SOA techniques and open standards. At the end of the demo, Mike will be taking your questions.

We encourage you to download a fully-configured version of the application, complete with extensive documentation, as a way to cement the very exciting things you will learn in this webinar.

Once again, here’s the registration link. We hope you can join us.

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 (1236)

 

 VOSibilities podcast #6: Mark Ford on BPEL4People [2:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (235)