The Temptation of Reinvention
Thursday, March 1st 2007 | Ismael Ghalimi
Today, there is not one week that passes by during which I do not hear the CEO, CTO, or Vice President of Engineering of a software company or online service provider complaining about the fact that some years ago, his or her company embarked on the development of a proprietary workflow engine, and today, its maintenance has become a pure nightmare. When no meaningful standard for workflow was available, and off-the-shelf products were quite specific and very expensive, such a custom development might have found some elements of justification. But today, with the adoption of well-established standards for BPM, and the availability of commercially-supported open-source platforms, there is absolutely no reason why you should reinvent the process wheel.
Standards have been set
If you still had any doubts, Microsoft’s recent decision to finally adopt BPEL 2.0 for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) should help you move on. BPEL won the battle of standards, and any BPM product that is not natively architected upon it is doomed to fall into obsolescence faster than you will be able to migrate to one that is. On the notation side, BPMN really is the only game in town, so I won’t expect that you will waste too much time trying to make anything else work for you there.
Embedding is easy
Next-generation BPMS products such as Intalio|BPMS have been designed from the ground up to be embedded within larger products. They are built on top of the standard J2EE stack, provide all the components you need out of the box (Application Server, ESB, Portal, etc.), and have a modular architecture where components can be easily replaced by others, thanks to the use of standard languages and APIs. The design tool deploys standard BPEL processes onto the process runtime, which itself communicates with the workflow framework though web service interfaces. Java APIs and web service interfaces are offered by the process runtime for administration purposes, connectors to third-party systems—your own application included—are developed using standard APIs, such as JBI and JCA, and the workflow framework can be used with its own user interface, or any user interface you might already have.
Performance is stellar
For quite some time, using a BPM system meant taking a significant performance hit, especially when compared to the use of straight Java development. Things have changed since the early days when BPEL was spelled BPML, and today, the fastest BPMS products can rival with any alternative technology you could throw at the problem. Here are some numbers collected with Intalio|Server:
- Largest number of individual process activities: 250,000
- Largest number of process models deployed: 100,000
- Largest number of concurrently running process instances: 250,000,000
- Largest number of individual end-users per day: 100,000
- Largest number of servers in clustered deployment: 1,000
- Largest number of in-memory transactions per day and per CPU: 14,300,000
- Largest number of persistent transactions per day and per CPU: 3,600,000
- Roundtrip call to a Web Service from a process: 14 milliseconds
No other product comes even close. None.
Source code is available
A BPMS should be viewed as an open platform, not a closed application, and as such, getting access to source code can quickly become very useful. One of the reasons why the development of meaningful industry standards in the workflow space ended up in failure is that there are very many different ways of doing workflow, and vendors could not really agree with each other. As a result, the next generation of vendors decided to tackle the problem at a lower level, came up with a generic language capable of executing virtually any kind of process (BPML, later replaced by BPEL), and developed frameworks that would allow customers—end-users and software vendors alike—to develop any workflow pattern, without having to reinvent the wheel each time they would come up with a new one. BPEL4People is one such pattern, but there are countless others that are worth using within the context of specific busiess scenarios, and using an open-source BPMS that supports workflow as a collection of customizable processes certainly is the easiest way of supporting them all.
Prices went down
If you are a software vendor, or the developer of a web 2.0 application, there is only one way you should look at the problem when it comes to cost: how many developers will you need to hire and train in order to develop and maintain your own workflow or BPM solution from scratch, or even from existing open-source pieces? If the answer is more than one, and they happen to live in expensive places such as the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, TX, or any major European city, going the OEM way and working with a commercial open-source company such as Intalio will save you money. If you also include the risk that your team could be late in delivering its super-duper workflow engine from the sky, the decision should be even simpler.
Others have been there before you
As of today, Intalio is working with more than 20 software vendors that are embedding Intalio|BPMS within their own products. Packaging and documentation are becoming better by the day, and bugs are fixed faster than we could if we were to work only with end-users. Our software is being used by more organizations than any other BPM vendor today, and it’s the only one that is available under an open-source license, and supports both BPMN and BPEL. So if you have in mind of adding workflow capabilities to your product, or if you would like to replace some piece of legacy code you do not care to maintain yourself anymore, make sure to give us a buzz.
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0
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Intalio’s BPMS is only a partial solution. It doesn’t support a critical set of business processes (i.e. EDI) that are the eletronic document flows, which complement the physical material flows along the supply chain!
Francis,
While we do not provide an EDI connector out of the box, building one as a set of processes is actually a fairly straightforward task. Sterling Commerce, the leading EDI vendor, built their next-generation EDI platform exactly that way, as a set of BPML processes. As a matter of fact, we have a couple of customers who are trying to build a very similar thiing with Intalio|BPMS today, using BPEL this time around.
Best regards
-Ismael
Building an EDI suite is never a straightforward task, as one would like to hope. A purchase order (PO) has many transaction sets, and some of them are nested within the others. The structure of a PO’s XML document is very complex, even viewed withiin a mapper! The most tricky part is how to map an inbound PO to an outbound PO properly, while meeting with the data requirements! There are many intricated processes for doing the mapping or transformation. Unfortunately, these processes are very convoluted!
Francis,
You’re right, it’s fairly complicated, yet not complex.
This problem has been solved, many times around.
Best regards
-Ismael
If the EDI solution already exists, why not incorporate it into the Beta and production versions of Intalio|BPMS 5.0? It will truly become a complete BPMS. To me, BizTalk aside, most, if not all BPM systems on the market are partial implementations. By the way, get the 2007 Office Suite and SharePoint, you will get the ECM and browser-based Office 2.0, which includes project management and engineering drafting (similar to AutoCad) in Visio!
Why project management and engineering drafting are important? Practically every bank, large retailer, or downstream petroleum company has an in-house architectural department to design & build new branches or re-design & renovate existing ones. For every business that produces physical goods, regardless of size, it needs to comply with designs from the customers, in the form of specifications and engineering drawings.
BPMS is more than handling business transactions, it must support electronic document exchanges such as EDI (PO, Manifest, Bill, Contract, etc.), AP233 (Product Data), PSL (Process Specification), and SysML (Product and Process Design). The BPM being promoted by IT oriented organizations, including Gartner, miss a significant portion of activities in the management of an enterprise! Gartner is a replacement of Dr. James Martin, an IBM research fellow, who became the de facto guru of the IT field in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, before Gartner even existed!
Technically speaking, a package for the design, development, and operation of SCADA systems can replace any IT oriented BPMS on the market, with much better user and system interfaces!
Francis,
We cannot embed it, because we want a pure open-source platform.
Best regards
-Ismael
Embed what? I never said embedding anything in a BPMS. I only pointed out the absence of components in most, if not all, BPMS. The missing components are:
1. EDI support;
2. Real-time iconic animation of states, in analog or digital form, of a process;
3. Definition of interfaces (or interactions) with real-time process control instruments with no codes.
Business Process Management is more than monitoring transactions. It also includes information exchange — EDI, AP 233 — and restoration of out-of-balance operations — real-time control of environment, production, and security. These capabilities have nothing to do with open-source or proprietary software.
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