Bea SOA symposium
Today I visited the Bea SOA Symposium in Amsterdam. It was a very well organized event, with a nice mix between customer stories (business case from Zwitserleven for example), partner stories and BEA product sessions. One of the interesting differences between the Bea SOA stack, and Oracle is the distinction between orchestration of business services and the orchestration or construction of composite technical services with BPEL-like tooling. In the Oracle SOA Suite, all process orchestration is done with the BPEL engine. If you have a business process with coarse grained services and workflow, you use BPEL. If you have a composite service, you define it with BPEL. I even heard someone argue once, that you should program user interface navigation with BPEL as well. Bea, on the other hand, offers two different products. Aqualogic BPM suite to model business processes and do BMP. WebLogic Integration to create composite services. This fits with a common notion that Massimo Pezzini also talked about: there are different types of process flows in an enterprise. In a way using two different suites appeals to me: you can map your tooling (development and administration) nicely to the different layers of process flows in your organization. This in turn, maps to the different skills needed to define the different types of processes. Business oriented people will feel more comfortable with BPM suite, technical (JEE developers) with WLI. On the other hand, it seems needlessly complex: Every time you design a process, you need to decide what tool to use. You need people that understand the BPM suite and people that understand the WebLogic Integration. You need to support and administer both platforms, pay licence fees etc.
If you have any thoughts on the subject, drop me a note or comment on the blog. I am very interested in ideas and experiences with both approaches.
Comments: (3)
Hi, Lonneke,
Excellent comments about the BEA SOA Event. What I can share with you and the BLOG users is that, reviewing different customer’s cases in Latin America, there are three major different roles involved in the SOA BPM projects:
1. Business Modelers. People from Organizations and Methods, or Product’s research and development divisions, that need to design the Business Processes. In the Oracle SOA Suite, that will be done with Oracle BPA (Business Process Architect).
2. Business Process Developers. People from IT department that will be in charge to implement those business processes defined by Business-people, and that will reuse the composite-services (E.g.: integration services, BPEL business services, Application Services). In the Oracle SOA Suite, this will be done using the single integrated environment, Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle BPEL Modeler. The JDeveloper will read the business processes definition from the Oracle BPA repository and will create a high level, Oracle BPEL process that will be implemented for making it work in the BPEL Engine with the integration services.
3. Low-Level Integration Services Developers. People that will design and develop loosely-coupled integration services, using integration protocol adapters, routing services, with an ESB. In the Oracle SOA Suite, this will be done using the single integrated environment, Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ESB.
This streamline between Modeling business processes with Oracle Business Process Architect and implementing the business processes with Oracle JDeveloper and running them in the Oracle SOA Suite’s BPEL Engine, will allow business and IT department create new composite-business services.
Best Regards,
Mauricio Naranjo
Chief Architect – Lucasian Labs
Oracle ACE Director – Oracle Fusion Middleware
BLOG: SOA para Negocios – Lucasian.com/soa
See http://www.oracle.com/bea/index.html.
Given these recent developments, I wonder how long this discussion will last 
Best regards, Sjoerd
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Hi Lonneke,
Nice write-up. I looked into BEA products a while ago when engaged in a selection process in which the client decided between BEA AquaLogic and Oracle SOA Suite. They eventually opted for the latter. BEA was very agressive in selling their software. Now that is fine. But BEA was constantly stressing what they thought were Oracle weaknesses rather than pointing out their own strong points. I think in the end that was what made them loose the deal.
That said, I am inclined to agree with your ‘on the other hand’ point of view. Especially in the current state of SOA maturity or acceptance I feel it is very important to limit the amount of complexity for an organization. For example, in my opinion a BPEL product works very well for business process decomposition in which the lowest level services are more integration oriented composites that may not be visible to the business users. Also from a systems management perspective it may be better to keep things as simple as possible and limit the amount of components that need to be managed. And you as rightfully state, there are licenses and contracts to consider as well.
Given the impact of SOA for an organization selecting the software for it is important. Hope more people will share their views on this.
Best regards, Sjoerd