On the Verge of a New Convergence

BPM solutions are not necessarily new. They represent a number of attempts, from workflow to enterprise-application integration, to solve integration challenges. Due to shortcomings in functionality, these individual efforts have created a wake of frustrated enterprise customers. The new generation of BPM solutions better handles the complexities of top-down, process-driven integration. Most companies are not yet fully aware of this new generation; they're still smoldering from the burns of previous attempts.

The quick adoption of Web-services technology for integration will only further drive the need for robust BPM tools that provide key layers of benefit, which come in the form of an easy environment to graphically build process logic for orchestrating Web services to fulfill business processes. BPM enables users to quickly assemble composite applications using functionality that IT has exposed as a Web service. This, in turn, enables businesses to more readily take advantage of Web services that partners provide and weave into collaborative business-process applications. Web services without process logic is like driving blind. Today's BPM tools can be a real eye-opener for customers looking to get the most mileage out of their Web-services implementations. So, why aren't Web services and BPM being mentioned in the same breath more often?

Solution-Provider Advantages

One of the key obstacles standing in the way of enterprises understanding the value of Web services and BPM is the lack of real business-solution-building at the desktop level. In other words, most enterprise users for these two areas of technology are still in the IT department. Note that most companies believe BPM only has value to a small portion of the enterprise,usually the IT and operations departments,and Web services is only slightly understood in terms of its business value outside the IT department. If these technologies are so great, then why aren't we adopting them with vigor?

It's a struggle to qualify, let alone quantify, business return on software when only a limited number of people in the enterprise realize its daily value. Solution providers can step up and apply their deeper, more intimate understanding of a specific customer's business challenges. This kind of opportunity to help customers build solutions at the desktop level is the elusive item that slips by many enterprise-software salespeople.

Solution providers also bring to bear client-specific, application-specific knowledge to an environment that horizontal ISV salespeople struggle to acquire. In short, a solution provider who knows the key applications of a customer, better understands the top process pains that plague the customer and has the tools to pull Web services and BPM out of the IT basement should be in a bullish position moving forward. Converging these two areas of technology will bring improved integration success and more application flexibility. Future applications could very well be created from the desktops of business personnel who assemble applications out of a list of Web services available to them.

Perhaps we're standing on the verge of a new set of application developers that will need the early guidance of VARs, systems integrators and others to help them begin to build composite, process applications from a Web-services foundation. The convergence looks promising.

Tyler McDaniel is a director in the application strategies practice area at Framingham, Mass.-based Hurwitz Group. Contact him at [email protected].