Sharing the BPEL Love

Assuming that everything goes as planned, the WS-BPEL 2.0 specification will be approved by OASIS later this month. This will mark the end of a four year long process for taking the BPEL specification to a level where it can be used in production for managing virtually any kind of business process. Intalio is a co-author of the specification, and has been supporting early drafts since February 2006, giving us some invaluable experience regarding its use within the most demanding production environments (Cf. performance numbers). But because the development of this specification was a collaborative effort, it’s time to share the love, and I could not think of a better recipient for it than one of our competitors—Oracle.

Back in October, the good folks at Oracle (Manoj Das and Alex Yiu), wrote a very good white paper on WS-BPEL 2.0, and its use for process orchestration. Of course, we compete directly with Oracle BPEL Process Manager, but let’s put that aside for a moment, and focus on the things that Intalio and Oracle have in common, among them our true belief in the value of standards.

Most legacy workflow vendors and first-generation BPM vendors have largely ignored BPEL, or paid lip-service to it by implementing useless import mechanisms that they believe will fool customers in checking the BPEL box. Problem is, BPEL is not something you can fake, much like SQL, and Oracle knows that better than any other company in the industry. In the late 80’s, when SQL started to get some traction, some legacy database vendors that had hierarchical database or network database products tried to catch the SQL wave by implementing SQL interpreters on top of their proprietary database engine. Of course, it did not work, and none of these vendors are in business anymore today. The same will happen with BPEL, and vendors that decide to ignore it today are just accelerating their path toward obsolescence and irrelevance.

One thing I liked with Oracle’s white paper was their support for not only BPEL, but also BPEL4People. Granted, the original document authored by IBM and SAP is far from a specification, but the model works, and it’s quite refreshing to see Oracle finally adopting it as well. I would expect a full fledged specification to be released for it sometime later this year, and this will once and for all close this FUD-infused debate around BPEL and its wrongly-assumed lack of support for human workflow. Human workflow is nothing more than a specific process pattern, and BPEL is largely sufficient to support it. Anyone telling you that BPEL does not support workflow is lying to you, and the best evidence for it are Intalio’s and Oracle’s products.

If you need some external validation that BPEL won, here are some analyst quotes:

“BPEL will emerge as the leading industry standard for Web services flow composition (0.8 probability).”
—David Smith, Gartner

“BPEL is the future of the integration space in my view… Why? Because the value is so much higher when you provide not only a way to integrate applications, but also a way to create services from them and put them into business processes.”
—John Rymer, Vice President, Forrester Research

Now, don’t let this fool you into thinking that BPEL is only for integration or orchestration. Again, this is what legacy workflow vendors and first-generation BPM vendors would like you to believe when trying to sell you proprietary process execution engines, or pie-in-the-sky architectures that take you from BPMN to BPDM to XPDL to BPEL—who on Earth could dream up such a monster? If you want to make sure that you can never change your processes once deployed, this might be a good approach, and surely as effective as hard-coding your processes into JavaScript code. But if you want Zero Code and One Click Deploy, the only acronym soup that has been proven to work is the combination of BPMN and BPEL. Design your processes in BPMN, then let the tool generate the BPEL code for you. This is available today, it works, it’s being used by close to 10,000 companies around the world, and you can get it for free.

BPMN is where Intalio and Oracle differ. In Oracle’s case, they do not have their own process modeler, and had to license IDS Scheer ARIS. Problem is, ARIS is not fully integrated with Oracle BPEL Process Manager, hence a lot of code has to be written manually. So if you want BPMN and BPEL—and you should—but do not want to write code, give Intalio a try.