Andy, our CTO at Solidsoft sent
out a link to this
post by Bruce Silver relating to Oracle‘s
foray into BPM.
Apparently, Oracle
acquired a BPM product called ARIS a couple of months ago and have used it as
a foundation for a product they call the Oracle BPM Suite. Apparently the key winning
feature in the package is the ability to “roundtrip” the design, where an analyst
can design a business process, pass it to the technology team and one the technical
team have made any changes or implementation, they can pass it back in a usable format
back to the business analyst. Current tools can convert the business design to a technical
design, but once the technologists play with it, there’s no way to reverse the design
back to the business view. This is accomplished by putting an interim model between
the business and technical view with metadata to both.
It should be interesting to see what this does to the industry, but hopefully it means
that other suppliers will be scrambling to keep up!