Laurent Lachal
Microsoft gets serious about BPM
On Monday, Microsoft announced the formation of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance (BPA), a group of 10 software vendors (AmberPoint, Ascentn, IDS Scheer, Fair Isaac, Global360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and SourceCode Technology Holdings Inc.) that integrate with or rely on Microsoft's business process management (BPM) technologies. BPA will help Microsoft meet customers' needs in the areas of business process modelling and analysis, business rules management, process simulation, for example. In parallel, Microsoft released a white paper to showcase its BPM capabilities and announced enhancements to its Windows Workflow Foundation technology in the .NET Framework 3.0, with a special focus on its forthcoming support for the upcoming BPEL 2.0 standard. Comment: Slowly but surely Microsoft is redefining the BPM market landscape, bringing BPM to a wider audience though commoditisation of the underlying technology. It will grab a sizeable part of the market via its usual ability, among other things, to create a partner ecosystem around its products and technologies. One of the most interesting aspects of its offering is its ability to marry structured processes with ad hoc collaborative ones by mixing and matching the collaboration and workflow services technologies sunk into its Windows server operating system with various desktop and server offerings such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. The company has, as usual, still to get all its products and technologies to nicely mesh with one another though (BizTalk does not yet support WF Windows Workflow Foundation technology for example). Like the rest of the BPM industry, it is also hyping up BPEL - a standard with serious limitation - even in its forthcoming version 2 release. For more information please refer to our report entitled 'BPEL: not quite there yet' that provides an overview of what BPEL is and how it is evolving and our upcoming report entitled 'BPM standards landscape: confusion and evolution' that defines how BPEL relates to other standards such as BPMN, UML, BPDM and XPDL.
