Recently I joined a Vendor-neutral Indian Services Company, where Oracle SOA is just another Middleware among TIBCO, WebMethods, IBM, Microsoft and all the BPM vendors like Pega, Lombardi(now IBM), MetaStorm etc.
I had Couple of very interesting findings while interacting with people who have traditionally worked on EAI products like TIBCO, Webmethods and JCAPs etc.
One thing I noticed people tend to relate Service with WebService and hence synchronous or real-time. So they were more comfortable with terms like Messaging, JMS, near real-time etc. I was getting a feel that EAI is a much better term than SOA. To justify the whole SOA story, I researched more and found some discussions like wrapping asynchronous service by synchronous services pattern and so ESB, which can do that. So that reminded of an Article I had read in 2007 SOA = ESB + EAI, how true, I thought.
Moving away from SOA, I found strong discussions around BPM, I started goggling to understand what the BPM story is, and found that since 2009 BPM has gained more traction than SOA. Instead to put in other words BPM is front-ending SOA. Instead BPM and SOA are used in one breath like BPM/SOA. Also I found there are two types of BPM, pure-play BPM and the other BPM which is more like BPM/SOA. My understanding of BPM was, it’s an alternative to packaged applications and custom development. It can provide the rapid development benefits + it's centered on the human centric workflow tasks and SOA complementing with the system centric integration tasks.
Reading the book on Oracle BPM11g, It sounds perfect, unified platform, BPMN2.0 runtime in same server, my next quest is to find out what killer feature BPMN will do so that business folks will use it instead of Visio.
