Vitria's Dale Skeen: SOA and BPM Empowerment Shifting to the Business User

For years, the disciplines of enterprise integration -- followed by SOA -- have always been perceived as "hard and techie." This has made discussions with the business process management (BPM) side of the house difficult.

Now, thanks to the introduction of new lightweight approaches via Web 2.0, SOA, BPM, and integration are now becoming more flexible, user-driven methodologies.

David Linthicum recently spoke with Dr. Dale Skeen, founder of Vitria, a well-established integration vendor, about this shift. (The podcast is here, and a transcript of Dave's discussion with Dale Skeen is available for viewing here.)

This is part of SOA moving into its next generation -- "the next great leap going together is really leveraging three very important technologies in the enterprise -- SOA, BPM and Web 2.0," Dale said. While these three areas are seen as separate technologies or methodologies, Dales sees their inevitable convergence into what he calls an "enterprise platform."

First of all, Dale said, SOA and BPM have always been a natural pairing. "SOA is an enabler that allows you to access business functions, and services, and data universally. BPM is a higher level that orchestrates these business services and human interactions in ways that allow you to meet a business objective. So hence, I've always considered these to be the perfect complementary technologies to work together."

Now, Web 2.0 is bringing SOA-BPM closer to the end user, Dale said. "SOA brings this universal access to services and data through the SOA enablement tools. It does in a secure, manageable, and governed fashion. Now, Web 2.0 brings rich internet interfaces, rich user experiences based on technology such as AJAX and Flex, which are universally available in your Web browser."

"Application integration is hard, and very techie. Web 2.0 allows this notion of mashups where you let users sort of integrate in a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-do fashion."

These are all new trends that are shifting IT empowerment to the business end user, Dale added. "Simple things like mashups, we're talking visual layering of information, we're talking about collaboration technologies such as instant messaging. All of these have a role in enterprise software. And actually, the introduction of that can be very exciting for both the IT and the business side."

IT professionals need not fret over this shift, however, Dale said. "It means that IT will be able to do faster technology upgrades because of that, they have more control over the server aspect of it, and the client side they don't have to worry about. They're going to be able to lower the support costs and it also brings fundamentally new deployment models such as Software-as-a-service, which we think, is going to be a fundamental part of business IT going forward."

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