BEA Beefs Up Biz Process Support

Now with version 8.5, the company adds support for version 1.1 of BPEL4WS, otherwise known as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services.

Jointly created by BEA, Microsoft and IBM, the industry standard language allows companies to include multiple Web services when describing business processes that span partners. “With BPEL, integrators and customers can now plug and play with best-of-breed process tools for analysis, modeling and monitoring,” said Sanjay Chikarmane, senior director of product management for BEA, San Jose, Calif.

Adding BPEL4WS to its integration product puts BEA on par with most of its competitors, including Oracle&'s BPEL Process Manager and Microsoft Biztalk 2004. “The problem over the past year is there has not been one BPEL standard. There were multiple offshoots of it,” said Tom Litke, executive vice president of marketing for WellFound Decade, a Jacksonville, Fla., developer of integration software for the financial services industry. WellFound uses BEA for its reference architecture. “It&'s important to have interoperability across multiple business process management engines.”

BEA also announced an agreement with Cyclone Commerce, Scottsdale, Ariz., to resell the Cyclone Exchange family of B2B integration gateways. And BEA has extended its relationship with ProActivity, Newton, Mass., enhancing ProActivity&'s business process analysis, modeling and monitoring software to work more closely with WebLogic Integration.

“Now ProActivity can capture the process, export it to BEA for automation,” said Chikarmane. “As it&'s running, WebLogic captures the statistics and feeds it back to the monitoring tool from ProActivity, creating a closed loop.”