BPMI.org confirms plans to expand BPEL
Published:29-November-2004
By BR staff writer
Standards organization the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) has confirmed it is planning work on a whole new raft of capabilities to extend the power of business process execution language (BPEL), a standard from the OASIS standards group.
The new BPMI.org work will be the main agenda item at its forthcoming Think Tank meeting in Miami on March 1st, ComputerWire has learned.
BPMI.org board member Derek Miers confirmed in an interview with ComputerWire that the standards body is working on what it is calling Business Process eXtension Layers (BPXL), a standard that would help to enable interoperability between process modeling tools and process management engines.
"We need to do this because it is clear that going through the OASIS Technical Committee process that developed BPEL would be too much of a long, drawn-out process," said Miers. "It took nine months just to get to where we are with BPEL. Without it [the new BPXL plans], there is a whole range of things that BPEL does not address. Things like human collaboration, tasks, longer running processes, transaction roll-back and the like. The OASIS Technical Committee process is just going to be too slow to address that."
"We're hoping to get a number of technical architects together to work on the eXtension Layers, to get a concerted effort across the group, perhaps with each member doing four or five days work on this per month," he said.
Miers said that he does not yet have a final list of the vendors likely to come together to work with BPMI.org on the BPXL extensions layer. As reported by ComputerWire, BPMS vendor CommerceQuest has thrown its support behind the initiative. Miers said the likely candidates would be fellow BPMS companies like Tibco/Staffware, FileNet, Pegasystems, Chordiant, and "even IBM". IBM is perhaps a less likely supporter, because IBM and Microsoft were the driving forces behind BPEL.
Miers said he is hoping that interested parties will attend the Think Tank event to find out more and come to some consensus of what needs to be done to take BPEL to the next level. "You have the OMG, OASIS, BPMI.org, WFMC, WS-I, W3C, etcetera etcetera," said Miers. "When you look at what they are doing in this area they are all subtly different. We want to get them all in the same room and move forward with a reliable landscape that is meaningful to the user community."
