SOA and BPM's acronym-challenged offspring

SearchWebServices reports that the analysts at Forrester Research say the SOA and business process management (BPM) markets are becoming one. Forrester has christened the resulting new product category as "integration-centric business process management suites," or IC-BPMS.

IC-BPMS? That sounds more like the missile systems that the United States and USSR had pointed at each other's cities. Run for the fallout shelters -- incoming IC-BPMSes! (BPM 2.0 suites, anyone?)

Products evolving in the new IC-BPMS space are actually next-gen EAI toolsets. "The products in this category have lowered the barrier between integration and new application development — particularly, the development of composite applications that extend the mindset of the organization to complete, cross-functional business processes," according to Forrester.

Forrester analyst Ken Vollmer, a co-author of the report, has actually been doing a good job articulating the growing convergence between SOA and BPM. At the SOA in Action conference in November, which I captured in a blog post over at the site, he observed that SOA is smoothing the path to BPM, while BPM is providing a reason for being for SOA:

"Business process management could be implemented without SOA, because both capabilities have been available for some time. But implementations of BPM without the SOA foundation take longer. There's more ongoing maintenance and support costs are higher, and therefore ROI is delayed. An analogy of doing BPM without an SOA foundation would be like a juggler with one hand tied behind his back. He can still do some juggling, but not as effectively and not as fast as it could be." 

Vollmer also pointed out that "SOA provides a more standards-based approach of doing BPM." The notations that come out of the initial modeling process can be exported into standards such as business process execution language (BPEL), "which then, in the form of XML, can be executed inside the execution engine," he explained. Then, foundational standards such as SOAP, WSDL and UDDI "support the interaction between the business applications and the modeling tools. If these standards did not exist, the model-driven development in the BPM tools would not be possible." 

In addition, he added, SOA repositories can be employed to "provide different views for different roles in the development cycle, all coordinated through the service repository. This will help keep all of the different roles in sync as to what's going on, because a change made in one view will be reflected in other views as appropriate."

The, er, IC-BPMS market may be set to launch, but two new capabilities are still required for it to break free of gravity. Vollmer said the market still needs "wider implementation of business event management (BEM) and complex event processing (CEP)."  Forrester defines BEM as "the process of capturing real-time business events from multiple sources and assigning them to the appropriate decision-maker for resolution based on the business context of the events." CEP is technology that "automatically correlates events into patterns that may represent a threat or opportunity and orchestrates an appropriate response."