Today, my article “SOA seuraa strategiaa” (”SOA Follows Strategy”) was published in the Mediaplanet special annex of Kauppalehti on SOA. Herewith an English translation of the article.
29fdMarch 2008
Monthly Archive
Thu 13 Mar 2008
Wed 12 Mar 2008
Last week, I visited the annual CeBIT technology fair in Hannover, Germany. As I spent there only a day, I didn’t manage to cover but a tiny fraction of the huge event.
To my surprise, only a few major BPM software vendors were on display. IBM was not there. Oracle was not there. Neither was TIBCO. If they even showed up, they were really low key.
Software AG, who had also invited me to the fair, was well represented. I took the opportunity to see a demo of webMethods Product Suite in action. At the first glance, it appeared rather good as far as administrative and BAM capabilities were concerned, but I didn’t become convinced of the suitability of the tool for complex business processes requiring process decomposition and collaboration. The demarcation between BPM and the underlying integration was clear, maybe even too strict.
With its Business Process Platform, SAP seems to be starting to get its BPM/SOA game together. I discussed the architecture of BPP with an SAP representative and wanted to know how it integrates with ARIS. I understood that they are not planning to have round-trip engineering in place, but only view SAP’s Enterprise Service Repository as feeding ARIS.
Speaking of ARIS, IDS Scheer had a great appearance at the fair. They also had friendly people and good coffee. It was interesting to learn about ARIS Controlling Platform and how real-world processes can be auto-visualized using reverse modeling technology. I also asked about the IDS Scheer and Oracle co-operation and confirmed what I had understood before: one needs to follow certain modeling conventions and use specific filters to BPEL-enable the EPCs.
Most interesting piece of news, however, was that IDS Scheer is implementing a “BPM governance engine”! It is the first time I hear about something like that. Something to look forward to sometime late 2008 or early 2009.
