IBM Exec Touts Need For BPEL Support, SOAs

Toward that end, IBM is building BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) support--as well as WS-Security support--into its WebSphere application server, Tivoli systems management and other IBM products, said Bob Sutor, director of WebSphere Infrastructure Software for IBM Software. IBM already supports SOAP, WSDL and UDDI in most of its middleware software.

BPEL is an emerging specification that would give programmers a way to formally describe processes underlying business applications so that they can be exposed and linked to processes in other applications. IBM and Microsoft submitted the spec to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for approval. For a while it appeared that BPEL was on a collision course with another specification effort backed by Oracle and others and winding its way through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) but those two efforts now appear to be converging.

IBM is not the only vendor beating the BPEL drum. Microsoft has said that BPEL support will be built into upcoming BizTalk Server (see story).

"In the next six months, I see a big focus on transactions and systems management, not just a lot of yelling and screaming," Sutor said.

Vendors, customers and solution providers now have to sort out where traditional in-house systems management ends and Web services management begins, Sutor told CRN.

Sutor also said he sees a growing need for BPEL support and the adoption of service-oriented architectures, a move to more modular, loosely coupled application development.

Service Oriented Architectures, or SOAs, are the latest incarnation of the distributed object architectures, exemplified by the older heterogeneous CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and Microsoft-centric DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) worldviews.

While many of these terms remain esoteric to all but the most technical, solution providers say true business process integration could pay off in spades in the real world.

Currently, integrating disparate enterprise applications is an unwieldy and extremely difficult process, one beyond the capabilities of many cash-strapped companies. "Right now, integrating, say, Siebel and J.D. Edwards is doable but it's trying to link monolithic things," said Brad Murphy, senior vice president of Dallas-based Valtech.

Instead of tying together two battleship-size applications, it would be much easier to link like processes within each, integrators say. BPEL is a step towards that goal.

"Imagine all that back-end automation is expressed not in some huge CRM application but in discrete way. ... there are processes to collect customer orders, verify customer info," Murphy said.

The parsing out of those underlying processes would let users strip out or ignore the sometimes-massive amounts of functions they don't need and not have to bother integrating shelfware.

Once the processes are broken out, the next step is to devise an intuitive tool to map out workflow, Murphy said. "Think etch-a-sketch. ... You draw out the workflow and all the pieces are plopped in and you can put a placeholder in whenever human intervention is required," he said.

IBM insists that its game plan will preserve existing investments in legacy applications, and claims that Microsoft's .Net worldview requires companies to rip and replace older applications and infrastructure.

Instead of junking things, why not replace "green screens" with Web interfaces, Sutor said. "CICS has worked great for 35 years, why throw it out? Microsoft's model is to yank everything out even if it's [just] three or four years old. Well now they're seeing resistance to that from customers."

Of course, IBM, unlike Microsoft, stands to reap huge services revenue from knitting together diverse systems. IBM Global Services (IGS) makes billions doing just that.