The latest Forrester report on SOA talks about the convergence of SOA and BPM. In it, the authors indicate that the term integration suite is becoming obsolete as it is replaced by integration-centric business process management suite (IC-BPMS). Although the term doesn't exactly flow off the tongue, is this an accurate assessment? Does the industry need this new categorization, or is it another SOA 2.0.
According to the report, IC-BPMS lowers the barrier between integration and new application development, and in particular composite applications and "IC-BPMS tools are uniquely capable of supporting model-driven, composite application development based on existing or captured business metadata stored in embedded, SOA-based registry/repositories. This approach supports high levels of system artifact reuse and can frequently result in dramatically reduced coding for new application functionality." Furthermore, pretty much all of the usual suspects have IC-BPMS products: we just didn't realize it until now. Expect the usual bandwagon jumping coming to a vendor near you soon.
Community comments
Same Concepts Re-Packaged?
by Jason Lenhart,
Shrink wrapped SOA?
by Mark Little,
Re: Shrink wrapped SOA?
by Eric Roch,
SOA = XML, Services, BPM, MDM
by Frank Cohen,
Same Concepts Re-Packaged?
by Jason Lenhart,
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"The new category of software products focus on business process capabilities using the service-oriented approach to provide connectivity through Web services, as well as the ability to quickly build new composite applications to respond to changing market requirements, according to Forrester."
Isn't this really the intent of SOA in the first place? If this is not ... then it would appear to me that they are implying that SOA is just component based software engineering.
"IC-BPMS tools are uniquely capable of supporting model-driven, composite application development based on existing or captured business metadata stored in embedded, SOA-based registry/repositories. This approach supports high levels of system artifact reuse and can frequently result in dramatically reduced coding for new application functionality."
This seems to me a re-packaging of Domain Specific Langs. and OMG's MDA.
Shrink wrapped SOA?
by Mark Little,
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Another worrying aspect of this is that it implies SOA is something that comes out of a box. "Buy IC-BPMS from XYZZY and all of your SOA problems are solved." That's scarey because it's building customer expectations for a big crash once they buy the software. Hmmm, but then again, I suppose if company XYZZY has a large consultancy arm then they can always offer their services (for a price) to the customer ;-)
Re: Shrink wrapped SOA?
by Eric Roch,
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I think you do need the tools in the stack they reference for most SOA implementations - plus more - like XML schema authoring.
Right though - there is a lot of work to do once you take the products "out of the box".
Here is a post on the report (mine)
blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/business/archives/soa-p...
SOA = XML, Services, BPM, MDM
by Frank Cohen,
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IC-BPMS is just as hard to verbalize as PMCIA. Why don't we learn!
In a world where BEA AquaLogic is actually shipping, it seems to me that the bar rises to where SOA architects, developers, and operations managers should expect that their tools will do:
XML for message and data schema definition
Service interfaces for interoperability
BPM for defining workflows using a visual flow editor
MDM (Master Data Management) to define a data tier that reuses silo-ed data
From this perspective the Forrester IC-BPMS architecture is not sufficient.
-Frank Cohen
www.pushtotest.com