Monday, January 05, 2004

Web Services Management and BPEL Grand Central was quoted today in Infoworld about the addition of BPEL support to their "Business Network" -  bringing a product angle to their previously announced BPEL Resource Center.  Grand Central seems to be in a bit of a transition (or perhaps I haven't been following closely) and appear to changing their positioning/technology from what I understood to be a general purpose hosted Web services management solution to revolve around some variation of business process management - and over the last while have brought the tie in to BPEL. Interestingly, CA who have recently gotten into Web services management also by buying up Web services management firm Adjoin made some noise  around  their solution which was then signed up to by BPEL vendor Collaxa. These two news items got me thinking about Web services management and BPEL.  Taking a look at the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management TC membership, shows a whose who of systems management and Web services management but generally only overlap at the big vendors - e.g. IBM, Oracle, Sun - and integration vendors - e.g. Tibco, WebMethods - with the OASIS BPEL TC membership. The other company that comes to mind here is HP - I wonder if some sort of BPEL/management story might be happening there given they purchased Web services management firm Talking Blocks back in September and have occasionally dabbled in orchestration/choreography - see Chris Peltz's presentation linked previously. In many Web services management scenarios, there is some sort of intermediary capturing and logging/routing/transforming/provisioning/signing/encrypting/unencrypting/etc SOAP messages - activities that could easily described as a process using BPEL.   In Grand Central's case they come at it from another angle - they are hosting a BPEL engine service to showcase business process provisioning to tell their story.  Is there a compelling use case for Web services management and BPEL working hand-in-hand?    Grand Central's apparent evolution to business process management from Web services management and hook into BPEL possibly makes a case for it.   I can think of lots of possibilities and complementary scenarios but I am not sure any particular one is knocking me out.  This might be an interesting space to watch/think over the next while. comment [] 5:29:13 PM