Linking business process analysis and SOA

Last week, Oracle announced that they have enhanced the version of its business process analysis software so that it can give better collaboration between the business processes modelers and implementers.

The Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite 10.1.3.3 will be the first "closed loop support" for business analyst and IT collaboration, sharing a common process model format with the Oracle SOA Suite according to Oracle in their website.

Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has revolutionized the day information systems with distributed computing and modular programming serving very large and intrinsically unassociated units of functionality, which have no calls to each other embedded in them. The services try to mimic human functionalities such as filling out an online application for an account, viewing an online bank statement, or placing an online book or airline ticket order.

According to Amlan Debnath, vice president of server technologies at Oracle:
"The new business process analysis suite features round-trip engineering. What it lets you do is share the business process model with IT."

With this linkage, it would become extremely easy for a developer to make alterations to any business process which would then be shared with business persons.

The Oracle SOA Suite features a SOA execution engine which has the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) that executes the modeling process done in the business process analysis package. This is an efficient feature wherein the IT users can view and modify business processes with the SOA packages while the business end users can build and change business models in the business process suite. Vital optimization effects in the Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite integration are the seamless linking of business process analysis, execution, and monitoring tools.

In the past, it has been a common occurrence to experience round tripping problems when it comes with dealing with business persons modeling a certain process and then handing the said process to the IT department which is responsible for implementing the process. Oracle has addressed this problem by intelligently "sensing" what the business person means and what the IT person interprets the idea to be.

Analyst Bruce Silver said: "Oracle has created an intermediate format based on shared metadata between the modeling tool and the implementation tool, which is the SOA suite. You solve this round-tripping problem now because the model is not just initial requirements for the implementation, but it's a continuous business view of the business process throughout the business process implementation lifecycle."

Oracle Business Process Suite is a component of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Platform. The suite's main strength lies in its efficient modeling, publishing, simulating and optimizing of end to end business processes. It is based on open standards and hot pluggable architecture and can be used with both Oracle and non-Oracle application servers and packaged applications but is uniquely optimized for Oracle's family of enterprise Applications. The price of the Oracle Business Process Suite starts at $5,000 for five users.