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Vendor announcements are dropping from the trees around here this week, but I found this one particularly interesting after my trip to the IDS Scheer user conference a few weeks ago: Microsoft has selected IDS Scheer as a preferred business process modelling/monitoring partner in the newly-formed Business Process Alliance. Now, before you get too excited, the press release says "a" preferred partner, not "the one and only", implying that other business process modelling and monitoring companies might also be invited to the dance; right now, the Alliance lists AmberPoint, Ascentn, Fair Isaac, Global 360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and K2.net as members, so no other modelling but lots of competing business rules and BPM vendors. (By the way, Microsoft's incorrect use of "is comprised of" on their page -- sloppy editing.)

There's a real-world example of the ARIS UML Designer (now part of ARIS SOA Architect) being used to model business processes for execution in BizTalk at Siemens IT Operations over the past 2 years, so this is built on a pretty strong success story. This provides BizTalk with a fully functional process designer, which was not a strong suit of theirs in the past.

It's not clear to me whether this is anything beyond a co-marketing campaign; presumably, the existing BPEL export from ARIS would serve for import into BizTalk, or IDS Scheer may choose to do a closer "standards-based" (but not standard) integration such as they have done with SAP and Oracle.

I have to say, however, that I had strong negative feelings about the term Alliance since I first watched the TV series Firefly: they're the authoritarian bad guys, right? Or maybe they only look bad from the little guy's viewpoint. :)

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:16 AM in BPA • GartnerBPM2007 • SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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