SOA in Action Blog

Sandy Kemsley, who has graced many of these pages with her insights, says SOA and Business Process Management (BPM) are a difficult mix, and, truth be told, one can be implemented without the other. But doing one without the other makes things twice as hard as they ought to be.

In a recent interview, Sandy points out that "You can do BPM without SOA, but it's much harder since you have to write all the interfaces to the underlying systems as well as other functionality that the services might provide as part of the BPM project, instead of just consuming existing services."

Likewise, she adds, SOA doesn't really need BPM. "You can also do SOA without BPM, but without a 'killer application' to use those services, it's difficult to justify the cost of creating the services layer in the first place," she explains.

"BPM and SOA are fundamentally different from a technology standpoint. SOA is the design philosophy by which you service-enable your enterprise, either by wrapping Web services around existing/legacy applications, or by building new functionality within the services. BPM is a consumer of those services: A service may be called at any point in a process by a BPM system. BPM orchestrates services and people into a complete business process."

Another trend to watch closely is Web 2.0, Sandy points out. While companies are cautious about approaching the social networking aspects of Web 2.0 -- blogs and wikis -- the integration aspects, as embodied in mashups, may prove to be a formidable force in the near future. "Many integration projects -- and I've been involved in a lot over the past 15 years -- involved too much code and too much time, even with today's tools. Web services, by which I mean those built on the WS-* standards, are considered too complex and time-consuming to develop by many people, who are using techniques like REST and JSON to create mashups."