Oracle Magazine - September/October 2010

business users, using our new Web-based modeling interface called Process Composer. It provides a Web-based process editing and configuration interface for the business user, with support for editing business rules as well. It can be deployed on the cloud as a service and allows a much more business-friendly way of interacting with the BPM system.

But underneath, the different tools are interacting with the same set of servers, process models, and catalogs. Other vendors have provided solutions that are “ tailor-made” for different user types, but they are completely independent tools with trade-offs involved for each, so you have to do a lot of work communicating the information between the different users’ systems. With Oracle Unified Business Process Management Suite 11g, we use the same back-end technology but we’ve provided different views for users to interface with it in a fashion that makes sense for their roles.

Oracle Magazine: How does Release 11 g support the idea of a unified technology solution?

Rizvi: First, we’ve brought together two of the most prevalent and popular standards in this area: BPEL, an orchestration standard that we’ve supported for many years, and BPMN 2.0, a standard that provides a business-friendly modeling and process execution environment. We provide native support for both of these standards because there are use cases where one is more appropriate than the other. A single framework allows you to develop your business process in either of these two models. You can even mix and match. Being able to leverage those two capabilities makes development more efficient because the two standards are now available in a single unified platform.

We also have a unified service model
that’s based on the Oracle Fusion
Middleware SOA platform, which provides
the common business rules. And we’ve lev-
eraged Oracle Fusion Middleware analytics
capabilities, providing business activity
monitoring, complex event processing, and
BPM process analytics as part of the analytics
capabilities enabled by the underlying SOA
platform. These, in turn, support the sophis-
ticated security and identity management
infrastructure in the underlying Oracle Fusion
Middleware platform. So we have integration
across these three areas [standards, unified
service model, and analytics], which allows
you to model and reuse components in a way
that is common to the platform. W