VOSibilities

…does it matter that it’s not “BPM, BAM, BRE, BRMS or SOA?”

That question popped into my head as I read what Tim Bass has to say on this topic because, as I hope everyone knows, we’ve just released ActiveVOS 6.0 (watch a demo here and get a free trial). ActiveVOS 6.0 is the first product to contain an integrated CEP capability.

For us, this kind of “territorial discussion” goes to the heart of why we did what we did in ActiveVOS 6.0. ActiveVOS 6.0 is something new…what we call a visual orchestration system. We put CEP, BPMS, BPEL and more together in a single product precisely because we believe that unifying disparate technologies is the key to finally creating an explosion of services-based applications. 

In his post, Tim Bass talks about a fraud routing example which he describes as BPM, not CEP. That may be classically correct. But who cares? Why have unnecessary and artificial boundaries among related technologies?

That’s the problem a visual orchestration system is designed to fix: the endless need for specialists. The constant conflict developers find themselves in all the time: “I need to do a services-based app, but I get to put all the pieces together myself.” We believe that when developers can choose from among many well-integrated, category-blurring technologies in a single visual orchestration system they will produce better, higher quality applications faster.

Take cars for example. Engine technology is clearly not the same as transmission technology. People simply want to start the car, and put it in gear and drive away. Likewise, developers don’t necessarily want to know the difference and become expert in the academic distinctions between BPM and CEP; they want to do fraud applications.

The real shocker is that IBM, SAP, Oracle and others ship developers an engine and a transmission separately, expect them to bolt them together themselves and presume that their customers accept it as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We don’t assume customers want that kind of suffering, of course, and our increasing traction for ActiveVOS gives us confidence we are moving away from this “my-technology-space-is-purer-without-yours” era.

So, while Tim has a good point that CEP is new, different and important, our belief is that the real innovation today is in finding a way to put all these things together into a compelling whole.