Metastorm and SAIC Strengthen Partnership with New BPM Business Practice
SAIC has assembled a comprehensive "business process fusion" platform that incorporates Metastorm e-Work as the BPM component. An Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution and a Business Intelligence (BI) solution will also be included in the new offering. With a horizontal focus on BPM across multiple program areas, SAIC's new practice will initially focus on operational risk management and supply chain operations. SAIC will leverage the domain expertise developed as part of its already successful Metastorm BPM deployments in the Department of Defense, federal intelligence organizations, and the civilian government to deliver both applications and consulting services that will help organizations achieve business process fusion across legacy and emerging Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environments.
BEA Systems and IBM, meanwhile, have published a white paper on BPELJ, which enables Java and BPEL to be used together to build business process applications. Available at http://dev2dev.bea.com/technologies/bpel/index.jsp, the white paper outlines how BPELJ works, according to BEA.Web Services Business Process Execution Language, commonly referred to as BPEL, was proposed by IBM, Microsoft and BEA as a mechanism for orchestrating business processes in Web services environments. It currently is under jurisdiction of OASIS.
BPELJ has been submitted a proposed direction for Java Specification Request (JSR) 207, through the Java Community Process, according to BEA. JSR 207 is officially called Process Definition for Java, and is to feature an annotated Java syntax and APIs for programming business processes in Java.
Interesting in that I was under the impression that BPEL was a specification for a platform-independant, textual language describing a Business Process. So what's up with a language specific (Java) of BPEL?
Reading the link above, it seems like BPELJ will extend BPEL to not only orchestrate web services to complete Business Processes, but will allow orchestration of process steps that may not necessarily be available (or desired) via a web service because the resources needed are local and more efficiently accessed with local means. The articles uses files, queues, EJBs as examples of these local services that might be marshalled for a process but not necessarily available via web services. BPELJ will allow Java services to play in the BPEL game. But not without some cost in the portability of your BPEL code, as I read this quote from the article,
"BPELJ is a combination of BPEL with Java that allows these two programming languages to be used together to build complete business process applications. By enabling BPEL and Java to work together, BPELJ allows each language to do what it does best. Since BPELJ is implemented via extensions to the BPEL language, any BPEL process is also a valid, executable BPELJ process. By standardizing these extensions, BEA and IBM are working to ensure that real world automated business processes will be truly portable and interoperable across the J2EE platform."
I think the key here is "...across the J2EE platform". If you code the BPELJ extensions, then your BPEL may not be portable to other BPM platforms. I'm not sure that this is the right answer to pulling in local, non web-serviced, resources into business processes.
Enterprise Architect - Agile IT Needs Agile Technologists (free registration required): Jeff Tash walks through a 2X2 matrix he calls the IT People Personality Profile, where agility is the ultimate state of being (and exhibited by a personality class he calls 'agiles'),
What are the characteristics of agiles? They invariably strive to deliver the simplest solutions possible that can meet all the requirements. Simplicity is paramount. So too are standards and modularity. Agiles possess the skills and talent needed to be able to look at both sides of a module's curtain—its internals as well as its externals. Additionally, agiles naturally solicit constant feedback from stakeholders.
I'd put myself somewhere between the Big Talker and the Geek right now. But it's all too obvious that Business thinkers with IT smarts are going to both be in demand, more likely to provide value to their businesses (and IT departments), AND more likely to have a stateside job in the future.
CRN : Daily Archives : MySQL Gets Ready For Its Close-Up : 7:58 AM EST Thurs., Apr. 15, 2004
John Sudderth, senior computer scientist at Scientific Applications International Corp. (SAIC), who was instrumental in moving parts of NASA off of Oracle onto MySQL is a big fan. "We've never had an outage. I attribute a lot of it to the fact that the open-source companies aren't competing in areas where they're trying to cripple each others' products. There's no finger pointing."Asked later if MySQL should be viewed as vying for IT budget dollars with Oracle databases, Sudderth said, "More all the time."