Friday, January 05, 2007

Value Chain & SOA

How does SOA help to speed up the Value Chain ?
This picture tries to provide an answer.




Posted by Picasa

2 comments:

Patiperro en Chile said...

I believe that in your case BPM is only a business design tool and you need to put a BPEL in the picture this is the implementation tool for process the business workflows. What is your opinion?

jf said...

Andres,

In all cases, in a logical design, you'll need a place where the state and consitency of Business Processes instances are stored and maintained. This is what I call the BPM platform.

Now it can be implemented in many different ways, using an ESB or not, usig BPEL or not.

IBM's implementation indeed transforms BPMN models into BPEL but there are other ways to do it.

For me BPM is the orchestration of processes at the intersection of the business and the application layers.

An ESB, maybe based on BPEL, can host the processes but its role is mainly to enable the applications inter-connectivity in the Application landscape. Of course Business Users Interfaces are also applications. That's why some vendors have only an ESB platform. At IBM there are 2 logical platforms (Process Server and ESB) but they run on the same infra (ESB)... Somehow at IBM BPM=ESB+GUI+State