10.01.2007
SOA and BPM Converging, Says Forrester
SOA and BPM are converging to the point that the "integration suite" market category is obsolete and is being replaced by emerging "integration-centric business process management suite" (IC-BPMS), according to Forrester Research Inc. The products in the new IC-BPMS category are "not your Dad's EAI," Forrester analysts wrote in the report on the convergence titled, "The Forrester Wave: Integration-Centric Business Process Management Suites, Q4 2006 - IT View and Business View Tech Choice."
"The products in this category have lowered the barrier between integration and new application development — particularly, the development of composite applications that extend the mindset of the organization to complete, cross-functional business processes," write the report's authors, Forrester analysts Ken Vollmer and Henry Peyret. "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."
"Wider implementation of business event management (BEM) and complex event processing (CEP) will need to be implemented," he said. BEM and CEP are new technologies, which according to Vollmer extend business processing to a higher level of sophistication. Forrester defines BEM as "the process of capturing real-time business events from multiple sources and assigning them to the appropriate decision-maker for resolution based on the business context of the events." The analyst firm defines CEP as technology that "automatically correlates events into patterns that may represent a threat or opportunity and orchestrates an appropriate response."
In The Forrester WAVE report, TIBCO was described as having the most advanced BPM features overall, spanning both integration-centric and human-centric features due to the company's aggressive strategy to sustain competitive advantage by adding leading-edge features, whether via internal development or strategic acquisition. TIBCO was also cited as a "good fit" for buyers seeking to implement SOA and BPM at the same time, because the underlying architecture of TIBCO BusinessWorks is based on SOA, enabling organizations to pursue both objectives simultaneously.
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