Integration

This story will change in 11g probably, but today there is Oracle BPM (originally Fuego and Aqualogic BPM) and a separate product for BPEL. This can get confusing because when you buy the Oracle BPM "Suite", you also get the BPEL product.

Every once in a while, I see an article written by a BPM pundit that attempts to make the case that the BPMN approach (Oracle BPM uses this) is superior to the BPEL approach or vice versa. Here's one example on InfoQ - http://www.infoq.com/articles/bpelbpm. Its title "Why BPEL is not the holy grail for BPM" is very misleading. This is a typical example of an author sitting in either the BPMN or BPEL camp criticizing the other camp's standard. In this article, the author attempts to indict all BPMN to BPEL conversion attempts based on the author's poorly drawn process.

Although I know that controversy boosts readership of these types of articles, in my opinion it’s not a “vs.”. Both the BPMN and BPEL standards have strengths when used with certain use cases.

Here’s one scenario where Oracle BPM and Oracle BPEL PM are synergistic. My background is with Oracle BPM, but I’ve used Oracle BPEL PM on a project for the orchestration of composite services. I used Oracle BPM to model the business processes understood by executives, managers, subject matter experts, business analysts and developers. Using the same simple role based activity flow process diagram, everyone understands what the business problem is and how the process will work solve the problem. The Oracle BPM Automatic activities in the process hit Oracle BPEL processes. Here we used the BPEL processes to hit and orchestrate the underlying IT components . We exposed the BPEL processes using the customer’s service bus and we invoked it from the Oracle BPM process’s Automatic activity (Oracle BPM -> OSB -> Oracle BPEL). Alternatively, If the customer had not had a service bus, I could have invoked the BPEL process directly from the Oracle BPM process via a cataloged web service in Oracle BPM.

Dan