James Taylor's Decision Management

Saw this press release talking about integration between Progress' Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Lombardi's Business Process Management System (BPMS). This strikes me as an interesting development as I believe that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), BPM and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) are all going to have to converge to provide a platform for the kind of systems being built going forward. Indeed, Maureen Fleming is quoted in the release and I think she has a nice view of how all this fits together (described in this blog post). While combining BPM, SOA, ESB, EDA etc does result in a kind of alphabet soup, I do think it is worth continuing to think about these technologies as a set. I see a need for a decision layer in all this but decision services, like many kinds of services, can be useful in SOA and EDA as well as in BPM.

Interestingly I just blogged about a piece of AMR Research on SOA and BPM for Enterprise Applications over on my other blog and they had some discussion of ESB support in SOA frameworks (many of which also had BPM support). While I am not sure that I would just lump ESBs in the Execution category (as they did), I do think we will see stronger support for ESB functionality (and indeed event processing and correlation) in BPM products either explicitly (as webMethods and Tibco have done) or through partnerships like this one between Lombardi and Progress.

Technorati Tags: BPM, business process, decision service, EDA, ESB, event-driven architecture, service-oriented architecture, SOA, enterprise service bus