Oracle has introduced a new component of its Fusion middleware to provide a unified foundation for business process management throughout its stack.
Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g, released last week, pulls together BPEL and BPMN 2.0 processes into a single runtime that incorporates human workflows with rules. The runtime feeds those processes into other Oracle solutions.
To that end, it integrates with Fusion middleware products, including Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus and Oracle Universal Content Management.
Business Process Management Suite can leverage Oracle’s Coherence distributed caching technology, which is also a part of the Fusion stack. The customer gets linear scalability as demand increases, and there are rich event processing capabilities, said David Shaffer, vice president of product management for Oracle Fusion Middleware.
The suite provides a role-based business process rules modeler that is focused on user-centric design, with each tool tailored to fit for multiple roles, said Shaffer.
Another tool called Process Composer, a Web-based process modeling and deployment tool, is available on Amazon’s EC2 cloud environment as an AMI (Amazon Machine Imagine) image, Shaffer added.
Processes may be analyzed and monitored with built-in reporting tools for further refinement. “Developers see dashboards displaying individual process metrics and aggregate data. They can analyze those further using business intelligence tooling,” he said.
That ongoing optimization, along with a model-driven approach to process development, helps business and IT professionals to “work together more collaboratively throughout the process life cycle than was possible in past solution development approaches,” said Jim Sinur, vice president of Business of IT Research Division at Gartner.
