The maturity of the business process management (BPM) market is signalling a broader change towards a loosely coupled architecture that merges BPM, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business analytics.
This is the view of Ram Menon, executive vice-president of worldwide marketing and product strategy at Tibco Software. To explain this emerging trend, Menon points towards the evolution from first generation computing to second generation computing.
“The first generation of computing was about database-oriented architecture, where you had a database with an application that sat on top of that database. You also had conventional business intelligence (BI) tools that pulled information from the database and the application and gave you a nice little analysis,” he explains.
“What's happening in the second generation of computing is that we are heading towards an SOA event-based, real-time architecture and BPM is becoming the next-generation enterprise resource planning,” he continues.
Menon believes this trend is rooted in BPM's flexibility, specifically its ability to adapt and change to external influences. “BPM is really integrating a business' processes with all the real-time alerts and sensors you already have in the system to respond in real-time.”
To achieve this, the following evolutionary steps have come into play: “Firstly you automate your business processes,” he explains. Once the BPM structure is in place, the processes need to be optimised to change in reaction to external facts - it then becomes necessary to implement SOA.
“Once you have your BPM and SOA in place, you will want to analyse the information. This is where BI comes in,” Mennon states. Striving to continually optimise the process, organisations then use BPM analytics to address any inefficiencies.
The relationship between BPM, SOA and BI has been fuelled by a trend that sees IP moving into the infrastructure, Menon opines. “This is leading to a new concept of infrastructure - driven applications. You are now able to take services, orchestrate a business process around them, and add some analytics to create a loosely coupled application.
“This is an application that is not monolithic. An application that does not require six months to change a bunch of code, which used to be the previous paradigm,” concludes Menon.
Share