BPMs and SOA

A very interesting article has been published by Celia Wolf and Paul Harmon in BPTrends on the 26th of September. The content is related to the BPMs Market and the Majors.

I have found the following paragraph a little bit exaggerated…

"Probably the major development, over the course of the summer, is subtler. All of the software/infrastructure vendors are continuing to put a lot of marketing cycles into promoting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). At the same time, there has been a growing recognition that SOA, without BPM, doesn't mean much. You don't do SOA just as an exercise in technology; you do SOA to provide better support for business processes, which you define in BPM. This is the clear message in all IBM's WebSphere advertising and it is increasingly the common theme of all of the major vendors who are promoting the move to SOA. Thus, increasingly, the attention that was focused on BPM is becoming mixed with the SOA marketing effort."

Even if SOA can be (or should be...) coupled to BPM initiatives, there are many situations where companies implement SOA for other reasons:

- Composite applications
- Portal integration
- Information Hub
- Migration from “old” client server applications to new architecture models
- Mash-up applications
- B2B

In fact, software vendors simply try to sell at the same time BPMs with the underlying technology...and all the associated professional services…

There are cases where SOA is justified only by the above mentioned reasons.