SOA in Action Blog

Can we really have it all – from SOA to Event Driven Architecture, to Business Intelligence, Business Process Management? That’s the question put forth by ebizQ colleague Beth Gold-Bernstein at her recent SOA in Action conference panel. (Full transcript here.)

Beth observed, for example, that when it comes to SOA and BPM, “companies are being bombarded with the message that you've got to have it all, and they are confusing messages about how these things relate. …I was rather surprised to hear [IBM vice president] Steve Mills use the terms ‘SOA’ and ‘BPM’ interchangeably, as if they were the same thing…” Plus, Beth said, there’s confusion as to whether EDA is a subset of SOA, or if it should be considered a separate architecture.

Panelists agreed that the relationship between SOA and BPM has always been a difficult one to pin down. And, in many ways, still off in the future. As panelist Derek Miers, CEO of BPM Focus, pointed out, “To be honest, when I put a paper together on the relationship between BPM and SOA a year or so back. I thought I was going to find a lot. And the reality is, I didn't find too many [companies] that were taking that combined BPM-SOA sort of style of approach.”

There are signs that this may be changing, Derek added, noting that there are ways SOA and BPM complement each other. “In a sense, SOA is like a best practice design principle,” he explained. “And if you look inside a lot of the BPM case studies, you'll find people applying business practices and principles that incorporate SOA-type functionality.” However, he adds, “I'm not sure I've seen a SOA case study that talks to the BPM end of the spectrum either.”

Instead, SOA-BPM efforts tend to fall within a “spectrum of activity,” he says. “Certainly, one can find plenty of cases that have services-oriented components within them. But did they set out to do a SOA architecture to begin with, or did they set out really to organize and solve some significant business problem with a business process related issue?”

Panelists agreed there is a developing synergy between the various trends coming together – SOA, EDA, and BPM. “I think that what we're seeing… today in convergence is really the result of an evolution that had taken place within the industry with the types of technologies that are available, systems that are available,” said JT Taylor, CTO of iWay Software. “The solutions that are being built for customers by combining different technologies, different types of underlying Middleware products, BPM suites, BI tools, into an overall solution that's really geared towards the true operational business processes of an organization. And really combining all these tools to support that.”

Lyndsay Wise of Wise Analytics agreed that she has little working examples yet of companies pulling together SOA and BPM within a common effort. For business intelligence applications to operate successfully, however, such convergence is important. “SOA becomes a key piece in terms of BI moving across the organization and being placed on top of different ERP, SCMs or CRM systems, in order to really have these solution interoperate and really integrate and converge with one another.”