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Bruce Silver has been posting about some interesting developments regarding Oracle. A while ago I was having a conversation with a potential customer and he asked me how ALBPM compared to Oracle's BPM solution. I answered, much too flippantly, "Well the first difference is that we're a BPM product and Oracle isn't. Oracle is just a BPEL engine." I regretted that almost as soon as I said it. Obviously people have very different definitions of BPM and certainly some people considered Oracle's product a BPM solution. I was just venting a little frustration in trying to compare apples and oranges. Oracle's solution had no business user modeling, simulation, or other features I considered essential to BPM.

But yesterday, Bruce Silver validated some of my thoughts. Apparently he had been having conversation with Oracle (including Edwin K, whom I have a lot of respecdt for) and Oracle recognized that Oracle Process Manager wasn't a BPM solution on its own. So Oracle partnered with IDS Scheer and OEM'd parts of ARIS to flush out their solution.

Which is interesting. I'm very curious to see some of the same details that Bruce is curious about. I've never seen a solution where business users and technical users see different versions of the model be effective. So I'm skeptical of a solution where business users use BMPN in ARIS and technical users use BPEL in Process Manager. The mapping just isn't clean enough yet, even with Oracle's proprietary extensions to BPEL.

I'm also skeptical of OEM relationships in general. ARIS has it's own customer base and isn't going to be as responsive to Oracle's needs as BPMS vendors ability to maintain their own toolsets. But we'll see what happens as the relationship is further fleshed out.

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