The BEA/Fuego merger is still keeping me very busy. BEA has great relationships with their customers and, as a result, a lot of BEA's customers are interested in hearing about AquaLogic BPM. That, combined with the usual end of the BEA quarter rush, as been making me a deliquent blogger. But all of the activity has certainly got be thinking about things to blog, so as soon as I get caught up I'll have several things I want to post.

In the meantime, here are some short and sweet comments that I'll roll up into a single post.

• Phil Gilbert has another post on the ongoing BPEL discussion. Looks like his blog is having some technical problems, but the gist is that BPEL is just an implementation language and therefore not really that important anyway. I couldn't agree more.
• Also on the BPEL front, I wanted to mention Ronan Bradley's post about ESBs. He notes that only 3 of the 8 products reviewed by Network Computing included BPEL support. It seems that even in the system to system world of ESB products, BPEL is struggling for acceptance.
• The Red Hat and JBoss merger deserves its own post, but I'll make a few short comments here. Those who know me from my J2EE days know that I've never been a fan of JBoss. I like open source, but I've found the leadership of JBoss to be very unprofessional. Both to customers and to their developers. (And this behavior is not limited to just its infamous CEO, Marc Fleury.) So maybe I'm not the most objective on the merger, but I predict that there will be culture issues between Red Hat and JBoss. Red Hat is a very practical company, whereas JBoss is very idealistic. I wonder how well Red Hat will accept someone who thinks that Red Hat is an "open source" pretender and wraps Linux in s**t. I also wonder how this will affect the non-core JBoss projects. I can see Red Hat wanting the JBoss server, but a lot of other JBoss projects are pretty experimental.

Posted by davidogren in BPM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My fellow eBizQ blogger Beth Gold-Bernstein has been using Alfred Chuang's comment that "BEA is the only unified SOA platform" to spark a conversation about the definition of a complete and unified SOA platform and whether SOA is really a product. I think she makes a lot of good points about the current state of the market, about what SOA really is, and about how the various SOA tools and components should converge.

However, it's also started a bit of a side conversation about the veracity of Alfred's comments. And to the people in that conversation I say "lighten up". CEOs and product marketers have been saying "the only solution to offer a complete..." since the beginning of time. A quick Google search for "'the only' BPM solution" reveals 94,000 different claims of uniqueness in a very crowded marketplace. Some of the top claims were "the only integrated platform to deliver both SOA and BPM", "The only unified ECM & BPM enterprise platform", "the only BPM solution that combines the industry leading analytics capabilities with a powerful business process management platform", "the only BPM solution that seamlessly integrates content", "the only BPM solution that offers enterprise-class search", and "the only vendor in the industry to combine the power of process, knowledge, and analytics in a unified BPM suite".

Every one of these claims is based on a very narrow definition. If you challenged any of these claims the vendor would come back with the argument "other vendors aren't really 'enterprise'", or "other vendors aren't really 'unified'", or "other vendors aren't really 'seamless'" or some other nonsense.

The bottom line is that anybody can be the market leader if you get to make your own narrow market definition. Alfred was trying to call attention to the fact that one of the SOA thought leaders and enterprise middleware platform leaders now owns one of BPM leaders. And highlighting that the unification of those technologies and strategies can benefit customers. A legitimate point, in my opinion. Let's not get too caught up in reading more than that into a press release.

Posted by davidogren in SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)