Sunday, May 20, 2007

Q&A: SOA and BPM

I will be speaking in London on Tuesday about SOA @ HP to a group of 20+ European journalists and I am getting ready for some potential questions. One of the questions in my Q&A document is this one: What is the relationship between SOA and BPM?

I've heard this question many times before and every big SOA vendor has the same answer:

  1. SOA creates a set of services (ESB, network, fabric...) and these services are orchestrated by some clever BPM tool.
  2. BPM is for business people, SOA is for techies.

I absolutely disagree and this is why I was happy to read these two posts from Steve Jones yesterday. Here is a quote: "for most Services the concept of "Goals" will be more useful than the concept of "Process" ". It really brought back the memories of Radovan's controversial business process blogging in 2003 and 2004.

So I know how I want to answer the BPM question on Tuesday and I can move on to the next potential question: What is HP's acquisition strategy in the SOA area? Hmmm, I don't think I will be blogging about this one...

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