While it is great to celebrate events such as Oracle SOA Suite 11, the actual impulse to kick start this blog was a shock: Software AG buys IDS Scheer – the company that creates the business process / Enterprise Architecture (EA) platform “ARIS”. ARIS is as well the basis for Oracle’s cool Business Process Management (BPM) offering “BPA Suite”, with its unique approach to align business process models and executable (BPEL) process in a closed loop.
In June 2006 BPA Suite was still a vision and I had memorable discussions with the responsible managers at Oracle Headquarters on Oracle’s plans for BPM platform. I was at a EDS project at that time that investigated ways to close the business / IT gap through model – code round tripping.
IDS Scheer was under discussion for a takeover for long time, I had IBM, Oracle, SAP on my list, now, surprise surprise, Software AG…
I follow Paul Harmon who said in his book “Business Process Change” that BPM tools will be mature and able to fully deliver to their promises by 2015. It will be very interesting to see what Oracle will do now and until then.
What is needed is a tool that allows to navigate from high level, abstract, not automated process models down to models of executable processes and, from there, allows to drill into deployed processes and statistics on their instances and their behavior. And from EA models that depict the system landscape down to the actual physical systems to get a “life” picture of your overall application landscape.
Adventures in SOA and BPM 