Category: services

(micro-)service oriented architecture

BEA picked up by Oracle

After a lengthy and tempestuous courtship, Oracle is finally acquiring BEA for $8.5B, a healthy increase over the original $6.7B offer last October. It will be interesting to see what emerges on the BPM and SOA product front from the combined organization; some large acquisitions in the past, such as IBM acquiring FileNet, seem to have caused more confusion than clarity in the market.

Gartner MQ for SOA Governance

Although I find it hard to believe that Frank Kenney and Daryl Plummer were hard at work all day on December 31st, that’s the publication date of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Integrated SOA Governance Technologies. Software AG, which placed well in the leaders quadrant, has the report available for download.

This is the first time for this MQ, and to quote Gartner’s definition of the SOA governance market:

SOA governance is about ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are operating as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality. This Magic Quadrant reduces the market to one set of technologies with strong architectural cohesion (integration) promoting ease of use and interoperability of product.

I found their definition to be a bit fuzzy, especially the part that defined the SOA governance market as including “products, sales, marketing and services specifically targeted at providing SOA governance.”

Lots of the usual suspects here — BEA, TIBCO, IBM, Fujitsu — as well as others who I don’t really think of as being in this market.

OMG’s Maximizing BPM Investments with SOA Workshop

OMG has a workshop coming up on January 14-17 in Orlando on Maximizing BPM Investments with SOA, and they’ve extended their early bird pricing of $695 until today. I’m not sure how late you can go while still calling it “early bird”; this extension probably means that everyone is too busy recovering from the holiday season to register for conferences in January.

ALBPM together with other BEA products

A couple of updates on last week’s post about BEA’s ALBPM:

  • Peter Laird of BEA has published a how-to on integrating ALBPM into WLP (WebLogic Portal), specifically how to use the ALBPM user interface as portlets. He thoughtfully includes both a link to the official integration guide as well as his notes on how to actually make it work.
  • ALSB (AquaLogic Service Bus) now provides out-of-the-box integration with ALBPM. I picked this up on a CBR news feed as well as BEA’s press release; it appears that this brings the design-time environments closer together. The CBR article claims that this allows you to store ALBPM processes in the ALSB repository and orchestrate them directly using the ESB environment, although it’s not clear to me that that’s a step forward in terms of aligning business and IT.

ALBPM 6.0

I’m long overdue in reporting on BEA’s ALBPM 6.0 release; I heard the details during a technical deep dive session at BEAParticipate, but the information was embargoed at the time (in spite of being presented in front of a room full of customers). This post is a combination of my notes from that time, an interview with Jesper Joergensen at the time of the product release in August, and other bits of information gathered along the way such as Alex Toussaint’s post on ALBPM and ALSB.

Although they did add some end-user and business analyst features, most of the release has focused on improving the technical strength and enterprise scalability — not surprising when you consider that this is the first major release since BEA acquired Fuego in 2006, and some of that time was spent ensuring proper cross-pollination of the BEA and Fuego teams. The 2008 release will refocus on the usability side.

For the 6.0 release, there are some main themes:

Process intelligence:

  • They’re adding  through enhanced business rules capabilities built into ALBPM, allowing for reuse of rules across processes and some BRMS functionality such as versioning of rules independent of process versioning. For those who have outgrown the usual limited capabilities of a BPMS’ expression engine, this provides a good stepping stone before a full-on BRMS is required. I still, however, believe that it’s better to separate them so that business rules can be used by applications other than the BPMS.
  • They’re also adding some smarts to capture analytics on the manual decisions that are made by users in a process in order to provide feedback on the probability of any particular decision, and even trigger exception handling or further review if someone makes a decision that is different than the usual decision at that point. This also helps to identify decisions that can be automated.
  • Improved Flash graphics in the BAM functionality using FusionCharts. BAM will see some major enhancements in the Condor release as well.

Standards support:

  • XPDL 2.0 and BPEL 2.0 are natively supported in the process engine, although no mention of BPDM
  • Enhanced BPMN 1.0 support; the previous version does not do a full BPMN implementation
  • WS-Security for seamless identity propagation.
  • UDDI 3.0 Publishing for processes that are being exposed as web services

BEA integration:

  • WorkSpace extensions for JSF and ALUI. Since I’m not familiar with these products, I’m not sure of all the implications here, but it does provide things such as plug-and-play authentication, and easy deployment of processes within the portal environment.
  • They’re adding RSS feeds to ALBPM to be able to get a feed of a work list or a pre-defined query on process instances — this has huge implications not just for integration with BEA portals, but with any feed reader or other application that can consume feeds, on any platform. I’ve been pushing for this on this blog for over a year now, and finally starting to see it emerging from a couple of the BPM vendors.
  • Integration of ALBPM and ALSB (Service Bus) for enhanced services capabilities such as seamless publication and subscription, and WS-Security support for authentication. Although customers are already using BPM with the service bus, this integration is intended to make it easier; effectively, they plug together so that ALSB acts as a UDDI for ALBPM. And for services consumed by ALBPM from ALSB, they’re using RMI to boost the performance over the usual web services calls.

Usabilty and infrastructure enhancements:

  • Forms creation is improved with a simplified flow, and also have a CSS-based look and feel.
  • They’re moving to an Eclipse platform for the IDE by providing ALBPM plug-ins for Eclipse 3.2: the Designer/Studio will run in Eclipse, and there will be Studio Eclipse plug-ins for BEA Workshop, which provides more seamless integration with other BEA development environments. Like other products that I’ve seen go this route, they’ll have three different personas (including a new  business modelling persona), so that business analysts aren’t stranded in a developer-type environment, but developers have full access to the Eclipse functionality. Their goal was to provide full functionality in the Eclipse-based version so that there’s nothing that needs to be done in the old version; this will definitely help to encourage early migration from the old to new toolsets. By being in an Eclipse environment, that also means that development can be more easily shared with developers who are working in Eclipse but not familiar with ALBPM.
  • Improved web services support, with support for web service Doc Literal, and extended PAPI-WS.
  • Enhanced deployment methods, including simplified J2EE deployment and full JVM 1.5 support.
  • Simulation using historical production data.
  • Mobile device support.

The 2008 release, Condor, will be focused on the following themes:

  • Business and developer tool enhancements, including a web-based modeller (initially limited functionality), and enhancements to BAM.
  • Enhancements to the engine to allow it to be embedded as an OEM process engine.
  • Better integration with BPA tools (IDS Scheer and Proforma were mentioned) to support round-tripping.
  • Additional collaboration and social computing functionality via integration with other BEA tools.

Since this is forward-looking information, none of the Condor functionality listed above is guaranteed to be in the next release.

Overall, BEA is concentrating on three main areas: SOA, BPM and social computing. They’re seeing about 20% crossover between their SOA and BPM clients, and I’m sure that they’ll be pushing to increase those numbers.

Integration World Day 2: Next Generation SOA

Santosh Mohanty from Tata gave a presentation on SOA, with a bit about the current generation, and how to move on to the next generation. Tata is a pretty major sponsor of the conference: I think that webMethods created a new “diamond” level of sponsorship just for them, which gives them both the opening night reception plus a keynote this morning.

His lessons for achieving next generation SOA:

  • Define agility controls.
  • Create an agile platform.
  • Articulate enterprise value in terms of efficiency, agility and adaptability.
  • Create a performance framework in order to create a performance-driven organization. This ties in strongly with webMethods message about “measure first” and the focus on BAM and analytics.
  • Create business and IT collaboration. Much easier said than done, and I’m not convinced that business needs to be all that involved in SOA since it’s really not relevant to most business people how the services get delivered, just that they are delivered. Of course, I see BPM and SOA and two distinct technologies; those that see BPM as just an extension of SOA will see business-IT collaboration as a necessity, and I think that Tata may fall into this latter camp.
  • Establish the right governance.

Tata was (I believe) one of the first companies to achieve CMM level 5 certification, and it makes sense that Mohanty’s first point is about control. It won’t do much to foster emergent applications, however. I think that all the large systems integrators are in a similar position: although there’s lots of work for them around legacy modernization and creating services, the current generation of BPM tools has to scare them, since it allows organizations to do a lot more of their own codeless development of business processes.

Integration World Day 1: Best Practices in Delivering Results with BPM

Bruce Beeco of Cox Communications told their story of how and why they implemented webMethods BPMS. Their goals:

  • Reusable processes independent of channel
  • Consistent experience independent of channel
  • Visibility into processes
  • Proactive on customer-facing problems
  • Automate manual tasks to reduce cost and errors
  • Improve time-to-market for new products and services

Overall, their goal is to move the processes out of the front-end applications using BPM, leverage existing services and provide monitoring and business health using BAM.

They started a number of BPMS initiatives, including monitoring and alerting around existing applications, modelling new processes, portal interfaces and others; some of these are in production, while others are just getting started. Being a Six Sigma shop, they took on business processes by creating a shadow process to an existing human process: they created a process model, collected data from the real world and correlated events to the model to provide some “visibility” into the process, particularly for the purposes of optimization.

He looked at the link between SOA and BPM, and said that you can’t do services without at least modelling the processes, since otherwise you just don’t create the right services: the models identify the service integration points and required functionality. He also addressed the issue of when to put functionality in a service versus a process in BPM:

  • Use BPM if it maintains state; services are stateless
  • Use BPM if you have variable complex outcomes; services outcomes are fixed and predetermined
  • Use BPM for composite process solutions; services are discrete entities
  • Use BPM for process visibility; services are black boxes

His key lesson learned was that BPM and SOA need to be done together in order to have a holistic view of your operations and business.

Integration World Day 1: Peter Kurpick

Peter Kurpick, CPO (Chief Product Officer) of webMethods Business Division, gave an overview of the technology direction. He talked about the paradigm for SOA governance, with the layers of technical services, business services and policies being consumed by business processes: the addition of the policy layer (which is the SOA governance part) sets this apart from many of the visions of SOA that you see.

He brought along Susan Ganeshan, the SVP of Product Management and Product Marketing, to give a (canned) demo similar to one that we saw yesterday at the end of the analyst sessions. She showed the process map as modelled in their BPM layer, where the appropriate services were called and other points of integration using webMethods, then we saw the custom portal-type interfaces for customers, suppliers and internal workers. They have Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor integrated with the BPMS that allows them to change rules for in-flight processes, and their own monitoring and analytics as well as some new Cognos analytics integration. She also showed us the CentraSite integration, where information about services and their policies are stored; CentraSite can be used to dynamically select from multiple equivalent services based on policies, such as selecting from one of several suppliers. The idea of the demo is to show how all of the pieces can come together — people, web services, B2B services, legacy services, and policy governance — all using the webMethods suite.

The original core functionality provided by webMethods is the ESB (originally from the EAI space), but now that’s surrounded by BPM, composite applications, B2B integration and legacy modernization tools (from the Software AG side). Around that is BAM, which is being raised in importance from being just an adjunct to BPM to being an event-related technology in its own right. Around all of this is SOA governance, which is what CentraSite brings to this.

The next release, due sometime in 2008, will be a fully-integrated suite of the Software AG and webMethods products, although Kurpick didn’t provide a lot of information.

BRF Day 2: How Business Rules Re(Define) Business Processes: A Service Oriented View

For the last session today, I attended Jan Venthienen’s session; he’s a professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He talked about different representations of rules, particularly decision tables (at length, although in an interesting way). He talked about the problems with maintaining decision trees, then as he moved on to business processes, he showed how a business process with the rules encoded in the process as routing logic was really just a form of decision tree, and therefore difficult to maintain from a rules integrity standpoint. As rules are distilled out of and separated from the processes, the processes become thinner and thinner, until you have a single branch straight-through flow. I have the feeling that he’d like to reduce the process to a single activity, where everything else is done in a complex rule called from that step. I’m not sure that I agree with that level of stripping of logic out of the process and into the rules; there’s value in having a business process that’s understandable by business users, and the more that the logic is encapsulated in rules, the harder it is to understand how the process flow works by looking at the process map. The critical thing is knowing which rules to strip out of the business process, and which to leave in.

He’s doing research now to determine if it’s possible to specify business rules, then automatically derive the business process from the rules; an interesting concept. In order to do this, there must be rules that constrain the permission and obligations of the actors in the process, e.g., an order must be accepted before the product is shipped. This presents two possible architectural styles: process first, or rules first. In either case, what is developed is an architecture of rules, events and services, with a top layer of business rules and processes, a middle layer of services and components, and a bottom layer of enterprise applications.