Providing an object lesson in how to finesse your opponents, IBM and Microsoft ended months of speculation last week with the triumphant submission of their BPEL4WS specification to e-business standards body OASIS (see Business Process Spec Handed Off to OASIS, Not W3C).
The awkwardly named Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) has been a subject of controversy for several months now — and not merely because of its unpronounceable moniker (many people shorten it to just BPEL, but I amuse myself by pronouncing it bee-pel-for-whizz).
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It has been the prime candidate for adoption as the industry's standard for co-ordinating automated business processes across multiple applications — an important role, now that the advent of Web services has made it much easier to link up processes from one application to another. But the more time passed since IBM and Microsoft (supported by BEA) first published the specification last August, the more people in the industry began to wonder whether its powerful co-authors would ever submit it for ratification as a formal industry standard.
Microsoft Answers the Royalty Question
Another bone of contention surrounded the question of royalties. There's been a lot of debate recently whether the companies that develop standards should be allowed to charge royalties for their use, as a means of recovering their development costs. Although this might seem reasonable on the face of it, many standards bodies favor a royalty-free policy, believing that if you want everybody to adopt a standard, you shouldn't charge them for it. Not only is charging a fee rather like levying a tax on the standard, it also gives the original owner an unfair competitive advantage, being exempt from paying the tax.
IBM last December made clear it would waive any royalties on BEPL4WS, but Microsoft continued to keep mum on the subject right up until last week's announcement that the spec was going to OASIS. That news instantly settled the matter, since OASIS only accepts submissions if they are royalty-free.
In the meantime, a rival move had been underway to try and seize some of the initiative away from IBM and Microsoft. Last September, Oracle led a move at the W3C (WorldWide Web Consortium) to take charge of setting standards for Web services choreography. At the time, I wrote that this was "an astute move by a vendor that has had little new to say or announce in relation to Web services in recent months" (see Weekly Review: Oracle's Modest Proposal). But Oracle and the W3C have ended up with egg on their faces.
The first meeting of the W3C's Oracle-inspired WS-Choreography group took place last month. After much humming and hawing, Microsoft finally sent two representatives, but then promptly resigned from the group a week later (see Microsoft's Exit from W3C Group Stirs Dissent). In retrospect, this turns out to have been the ultimate in one-upmanship. Not only did Microsoft get to size up the strength of the group from the inside, it also ensured that most of the media coverage focussed on its own attendance and subsequent resignation.
IBM, Microsoft Muster Support
There can be no doubt that last week's submission to OASIS had already been at an advanced stage of planning when the W3C meeting took place. Enterprise software heavyweights SAP and Siebel are listed as co-authors alongside IBM and Microsoft, which is not exactly the sort of participation that can be arranged in an afternoon. In addition, there are some 20 more co-submitters, including Intalio, the author of rival business process standard BPML (Business Process Modeling Language).
By assembling such an august collection of supporters — and then submitting the specification to OASIS, the standards body that already looks after the other important business process standards such as BPSS (Business Process Specification Schema) — IBM and Microsoft have sent the strongest possible signal that BPEL4WS has broad-based support from across the industry. It was the standards world's own version of a "shock and awe" attack.
That Oracle and the W3C were left open-mouthed and dumbstruck by this news only serves to illustrate how little influence they have in business process circles. Surely if they had had their fingers on any pulses that matter, they would at least have had enough warning to have prepared a dignified press statement? Far from seizing the initiative, they have been left looking even more irrelevant and out-of-touch than they were when they started. That is quite an achievement for the W3C, desperately in need of a boost to its credibility after criticism of projects such as the Semantic Web, which many see as far removed from present-day business needs.
The good news for the rest of us is that this decisive move has swept away previous uncertainty at a crucial layer of what many are starting to call the service-oriented architecture (SOA) stack. Web services are just an element in this overall picture, providing a flexible, standards-based foundation for linking services together. Further up the stack come emerging standards for security and reliable messaging. Business process software is the layer that takes all this underlying technology and starts co-ordinating it to do something useful.
The Power of SOA
A new report by specialist analyst firm ZapThink last week spelt out the huge scale of what can be achieved by putting all of this together (see Service-Oriented Process to Cannibalize Integrators). Bringing BPEL4WS to the standards table in such a convincing manner has brought us suddenly closer to the day when, instead of being held back by the limitations of software automation, businesses will at last be able to harness all its potential to meet the needs of their organizations.
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