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Survivor's Guide to 2007: Enterprise Applications: Page 4 of 6

BPEL Is People

Also fitting squarely into SOA is the much-maligned BPEL standard, which BPM vendors were still shakily implementing while adopting Web services. While the BPEL4People initiative, proposed jointly by IBM and SAP AG in August 2005, has yet to pick up much steam, it was a step in the right direction. BPEL 1.1, its machine-oriented predecessor, dealt poorly with "human integration," which admittedly sounds more like something out of a bad Sci-Fi Channel Original horror flick than a technology initiative. But the intention was good--to address the lack of people in the would-be-standard markup language that describes business processes.

BPEL 2.0 is moving in the same direction as WS-Policy. BPEL 2.0 will support separate subprocess definitions, in much the same way WS-Policy is designed to be a framework upon which domain-specific policies are defined. Unfortunately, it isn't getting there very fast, so the ISV community has been left with BPEL 1.1 as the primary standard upon which it can claim its products are standards-based.

In the coming year, BPM vendors will improve crucial visibility options, both for external and internal customers. You'll also see better support of externalized business rules from existing and new vendors in the space.

SOA Payday

We've said it for several years now: SOAs will change the face of enterprise application infrastructures. In 2006 the technology finally started to pay off for applications in general. SOA hugely simplified the most painful of IT chores by decreasing the time and cost of integration projects and leaving more time for developers to implement applications.

In 2007, enterprises without a strong plan of execution for SOA will start to encounter problems, primarily around management and governance, which are not the same. Management tasks include load balancing, monitoring SLAs (service-level agreements) and enforcing policy, while governance is about managing the metadata associated with the whole system. SOA management will continue to evolve and be an instrumental piece of the SOA landscape in 2007, providing an opportunity to control the deployment and run-time behavior of services in every corner of the enterprise.