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Software AG Looks to SOA and BPM in 2008
1/7/2008
Providers of service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions may face a long road ahead--or not--as we look to 2008. Still, SOA solution providers have always had a tough task. SOA products are based on an IT architectural approach that requires getting management and IT support together on the same page.
Some SOA solution providers have recently acknowledged the difficulty. For instance, Oracle's Larry Ellison was cited by analyst firm ZapThink in December as saying that SOA adoption has been "slow." ZapThink analysts themselves haven't shied away at all from critiquing the reasons for this sluggish SOA uptake, with ZapThink's Jason Bloomberg editorializing on "Who's Killing SOA?"
One idea that seemed to plant a flag for SOA adoption -- around which both CEO and IT departments could rally--was the concept of riding business process management (BPM) applications on top of an SOA. BPM would become the "killer app" for organizations, and SOA would facilitate it. An IBM architect embraced this approach. So, too, has Darmstadt, Germany-based Software AG, which acquired its own BPM product when it acquired Fairfax, Va.-based webMethods in June of last year.
Software AG also recently made news, by way of the analyst world, by breaking into Gartner's business process management suites (BPMS) Magic Quadrant report as a "leader" for the first time. The report, "Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites, 2007," defines BPMS in a nuanced way, and describes Software AG's webMethods product as a "business process platform" rather than a BPMS. Still, the report does acknowledge (on page 2) that SOA is expected to have a facilitating role for BPM solutions over the next five to 10 years.
I spoke with Ivo Totev, Software AG’s chief marketing officer, as 2007 closed. He explained that Software AG had an overall strategy extending about three years back to add BPM to SOA as a way to address the hurdles that SOA faced in a siloed IT world. Totev came to Software AG with 13 years experience to help shape its SOA business. He worked at Progress Software, Forte Software (acquired by Sun), Sun Microsystems and SAP before joining Software AG.
Totev early on had worked with Peter Kürpick, Software AG's executive board member with overall responsibility for the webMethods product portfolio, on some of Software AG's key development lines.
"We had an early view that BPM could become a killer app on top of SOA," Totev said. "When you looked at the BPM market three years ago, there was a lot of human-centric stuff out. There was a lot of models to shape and define business processes, but it was tough at that particular time to connect those business processes to actual components in the IT operations side."
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