WebSphere 5, Other IBM Offerings To Get New Workflow Engine

Partners will be able to use that functionality to mix-and-match various Web services and put them through the same workflow processes, an IBM executive said Wednesday.

The WebSphere Application Server Version 5, due late next month, will embed a new workflow engine that will help business partners implement diverse Web services quickly, said Stefan Van Overtveldt, director of WebSphere technical marketing at IBM Software, Somers, N.Y.

"The engine is particularly strong in doing workflow between J2EE assets and Web services so you can combine multiple Web services into a single, logical flow," he said.

The J2EE 1.3-based engine will recognize such emerging standards as the Business Process Extension Language for Web Services (BPEL4WC), he added.

In addition, it will support what IBM calls compensation. "If for some reason you need to back out of a workflow, if a transaction fails, it is not a simple undo [back to the beginning of the process. If a workflow has an order coming in, it checks inventory, schedules production parts that are not available, does a credit check, creates an invoice and shipping order. If something goes wrong in the invoice phase, the order is not deleted," Van Overtveldt said.

"The workflow engine is going into MQ Workflow so you get the advantage of common security and common management environment across the products," he said. "This does not mean that MQ Workflow is going away. We will continue to have that type of offering, but it will be running on a new engine."

IBM has been extremely aggressive with its WebSphere lineup. So much so that even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer cited the WebSphere as a competitive threat last June.

Some observers say Microsoft's planned Jupiter bundle of Commerce Server 2002, Content Management Server 2002 and BizTalk Server 2002, unveiled last week, is a response at least in part to IBM's WebSphere-branded offerings.

"IBM's been knocked for having too many workflow technologies. There's one for WebSphere, one for CrossWorlds, one for MQ Workflow and they just bought one with Holosofx. Sounds like they're cleaning all that up," said Shawn Willett, an analyst at Current Analysis.

Last September, IBM bought Holosofx, a privately held El Segundo, Calif.-based specialist in business-process modeling tools. It bought EAI vendor CrossWorlds last January for $129 million.

Microsoft is moving along the same technology consolidation road with Jupiter, Willett added. It has selected the BizTalk orchestration tool over analogous technologies from itsother servers for use in Jupiter, Willett said.

IBM delivered WebSphere Studio Version 5 in September and plans to ship a version of its WebSphere Portal tailored for the SMB community by the end of the month. (See related story.)

That offering comes with an aggressive price tag of $77 per user, which some partners said could help it compete against Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server.

The application server battle has changed dramatically in the past two years, observers said. Former app server powers such as BEA Systems and ATG "are all trying to find new and different things to engage in because the application platform is really, in my estimation, an IBM Websphere play," said Brian Glidden, director of the IBM National Alliance Partnership at Covansys, an IT consultancy based in Farmington Hills, Mich.