Like the Casablanca police chief in the movie of the same name, I’m shocked… shocked that Oracle had not had a Business Process Management (BPM) suite before September 22, 2008. Oracle has had an SOA Suite, an EDA suite, a WebCenter suite, a Data Integration suite, and so forth for some years but apparently no BPM suite. To be fair, for a few months it has had something called the “BPM Suite for non-Oracle Middleware” but who would want to buy a product with such a long name and a negative in it.
Until this announcement, I gave Oracle credit for correctly recognizing that BPM was not a product type. BPM is a value proposition. You can manage business processes with EAI software, pureplay engines, Microsoft Outlook, Documentum ECM, an IBM CICS transaction monitor, or about a dozen other product types if you choose to. It’s just a matter of what is best for your business.
In what must be a new technique in press-release writing, the only coherent sentence in the press release is the headline. The rest of the release is unrelated fragments and bullets. In the headline Oracle claims that by combining a bunch of its separate technologies it is the “industry’s most comprehensive BPM solution.” That writing style makes the Oracle claim hard to dispute but I could prove that it is the industry’s most heterogeneous BPM suite. It at least combines the Collaxa-based BPEL Process Manager, the Sandia-Labs-based rules-engine it acquired a few years back (unless it uses something from Hayes?), something not described from BEA (the Plumtree portal perhaps), and the alert monitoring additions from Oracle Integration Server Version 2. The whole stew is described as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Ironically, one analyst said in 2005 that the alert monitoring feature was based on technology acquired from OutlookSoft, a company that has since been acquired by SAP. (I was at the same 2005 meeting but do not have that factoid in my notes.)
That’s not to say Oracle is new to the BPM business. With the products it had on in its web site before the BEA merger(most of the things mentioned in today’s press release are not priced separately in the July 2008 Oracle price list) and the functionality BEA/Fuego offered, Oracle has been a major player in meeting your needs for BPM as a value propostion for years. But apparently Oracle has given into the buzzword gods in the PR and marketing group and put BPM into the product name.
-- Dennis Byron
Leave a comment