Collaborate SOA And BPM For Tangible, Significant Results

As the Indian economy integrates and aligns more and more with the global economy, industry verticals are gearing up to compete internationally. This changing landscape has made Indian companies opt for world-class enterprise applications and solutions from IT vendors to help them upgrade their legacy systems and applications, in order to meet their goals as well as the expectations of their customers, business partners and shareholders. Collaboration of BPM with SOA at multiple levels delivers tangible results and significant returns, in terms of flexibility, re-use and adaptability along with better decision-making and measurable ROI. Closer alignment between IT and business delivers significant returns including enhanced productivity, competitive advantage and cost savings. BPM and SOA together present themselves as a disruptive technology platform, using which organisations can develop an ecosystem, fostering coherent synergies among the various lines of business and offer best-of-breed services. Explains Ken Vollmer, principal analyst, Forrester, "The ability of organisations to capture and effectively reuse their business metadata is a key requirement, for achieving their digital business architecture and Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) products, directly support these efforts. Process models, business rules, semantic data and predefined business services are examples of business knowledge, that can be captured in metadata repositories and accessed by BPMS tools using Web services." The discussion on SOA and BPM has moved from integration to the convergence stage. Now CIOs are demanding solutions which will cater to BPM and SOA needs of their organisations simultaneously. Addressing Business And IT Needs Better The biggest challenge faced by enterprises today is how to deliver productivity, agility and flexibility, while also driving down the costs of integration initiatives. Although BPM is essentially business-driven whereas SOA is IT-driven, a holistic approach to integrating architecture is necessary to address real-time business challenges of creating new value from existing IT investments and achieving new levels of business agility. According to Vollmer, “There are currently two major BPMS categories found and they are human-centric (HC-BPMS), that focus on interactions between people. Integration-centric (IC-BPMS)focuses on interactions between back-end applications and their users, plus external business partners." The major trend that will emerge, is that these products will converge and blend into one category over the next couple of years. BPM and SOA do not have to be addressed in isolation. IC-BPMS products provide extensive support for SOA that is built into the foundation of these products. HC-BPMS products can consume and create Web services, but do not provide direct support for Web services management and governance issues. Convergence of BPM and SOA will bring together business and technology to drive efficiency throughout the organisation. Informs Sunil Mehra, director, Sales, Fusion Middleware, Oracle India, "SOA and BPM are clearly complementary approaches. In the real world of implementation, SOA is a design concept, while BPM represents a set of products one can actually buy. Furthermore, because of the close relationship between BPM and SOA, BPM products can serve as a perfect backbone for broader SOA initiatives. SOA addresses the technology need for agility and adaptability, while BPM addresses both the business and the

technology needs. The goal of SOA initiatives is agility. SOA enables rapid implementation of process changes by re-using existing IT capabilities in a flexible manner. Yet SOA alone is not sufficient to align processes with business goals and increase the visibility of business performance. SOA enables enterprises to be flexible and deliver new services faster and at the same time BPM helps in increasing operational efficiency and reducing operational costs. When used together, SOA and BPM enable businesses to respond competitively to changes in the market. Convergence Platform To Help CIOs With a convergence platform sCIO are well-equipped to align business and IT around business processes. BPM acts as a backbone for SOA-based services of an organisation. As BPM provides extensive tracking, monitoring, reporting and analysis facilities, the deployed services could be easily measured for performance and optimisation. Says Punit Jain, vice president, Sales and Marketing, Newgen Software, "BPM-SOA combination can be leveraged to design and implement truly end-to-end automated solutions, built by using existing functionalities, resulting into huge costs savings and decreased time to market. Businesses can fully exploit the combined capabilities of BPM and SOA to quickly scale the solutions to higher transaction demands." The combination offers effective multiple-channel integration capabilities in a heterogeneous ecosystem where organisations operate in multiple lines of businesses. CIOs should look for solutions which will offer both SOA and BPM in a single product. The combination ensures compliance to ever-changing regulations, which could be a nightmare for a huge organisation running multiple siloed applications, dealing with repetitive and redundant data. It will also help organisations develop a coherent, integrated ecosystem of applications and facilitate easy compliance to regulatory norms. Vollmer concludes, "By placing process models and business rules in a location that is readily accessible to business users, the business side of the house can be more actively involved in the definition, monitoring, and optimisation of its business processes. As the ability to reuse application and business artifacts increases and as more of them are defined in repositories, creating new applications becomes less expensive, as less manual coding is required than in the past."