Jim Sinur

Oracle wants to engage the business user in BPM. With that as goal, Oracle has set out to have a more business friendly BPM experience at several levels. First the modeling environment is greatly improved, secondly the BAM environment is usable plus somewhat seamless and finally the integrated rules environment is finally usable by non-IT types. I would say that it is a good start and can compete for business with those organizations that do not use any of the Oracle applications. In other words, Oracle can compete with IBM and the independents on platform and with SAP on applications. This makes Oracle unique and dangerous to other vendors. The good news for the other vendors is that Oracle BPM 11g R1 is not generally available today, so only beta users have the experience to prove my points above or not.

To that end, Oracle put me face to face with three Oracle BPM 10g users. One was an example of an integration driven approach (did not prove business use at all), another was a reticent recent purchaser of Oracle BPM with no experience waiting for other users to pioneer use of Oracle BPM, but the third was interesting. This aerospace company was using Oracle BPM to link systems together at the business flow level. In their case they used Oracle BPM for workflow and Oracle BPEL to link legacy systems together (Oracle BPM 10g has two pieces; brought together with business rules in Oracle 11g R1). This was interesting in that the business folks were heavy users, but not heavy developers of the process flow. This client was looking forward to Oracle 11g because it was more business friendly. While the proof points for BPM 11g are not there yet, there is hope.

Oracle does have a vision and an architecture for unstructured and goal driven processes, so I was encouraged for clients that buy Oracle BPM will be carried forward. Where Oracle falls down a bit is in allowing business users to find reusable services. The SOA environment is very programmer centric in my view. I do not see Oracle leveraging their legacy application service (pseudo services really) like SAP is at the moment. Oracles complex event environment is an extra bonus for driving processes. If Oracle BPM 11g R1 works as advertised (to be determined), Oracle is ahead of the other power vendors. The BPMS independents still have an 18 month lead, but the gap is closing from 24 months. .