If you didn’t hear much about business process management (BPM) during Microsoft’s 2008 Professional Developer Conference (PDC) keynotes, you were listening closely. Part of the reason is that Microsoft runs separate events for business process analysts. Part of the reason in my opinion is that Microsoft still has a disjointed BPM strategy. This is compounded, as I have written elsewhere with the disjointed Software Plus Services strategy.
However, Steve Martin has been trying to make up for Microsoft’s “PDC big-tent” silent treatment of BPM on his blog. It is not by accident that the direction of BizTalk (SOA, ESB, B2B, RFID, adapters, etc.), the application server functionality built into Windows, and the existing and upcoming .NET Microsoft products (under the codename Oslo along with the already announced Workflow Foundation-WF and Windows Communication Foundation-WCF) all report to Steve. On October 10th, he described how the M modeling and Quadrant visual-design capabilities will help business (process) analysts. On October 27, he explained the implications on BizTalk and WF (and a lot of other things) of the Azure cloud computing announcement from a run-time perspective.
As for Windows Azure cloud computing capabilities, it’s kind of interesting stuff although still months if not years away. Azure offers the inevitable “new paradigm” in that it is not rooted in scale up but scale out (called horizontal scale), setting the stage for the “next 50 years of systems.” That means in addition to more easily enabling BPM, it will support new patterns and practices; model based programming; new binding practices; and advanced parallel computing.
-- Dennis Byron
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