"The Convergence and Unification of SOA, EDA & BPM: Benefits and Challenges"

Speaker: Manas Deb (Oracle)

Day 1: SOA Architecture & Design

In our day-to-life we take many actions as reactions to external stimuli. Our actions often take the form of sequence activities. We accomplish many these activities, at least in part, with the help of others. And, sometimes, our activities create stimuli for others to react upon. A business operation is not much different. A customer order submission "event" triggers a "business process" that starts coordinating a set of human and machine activities where employees or computer applications provide the necessary "services" in order to complete those activities. Then the customer decides to change the order and the business needs to interrupt or modify the execution of the order. Also, as the business process executes, occasionally it causes alerts for the business to handle, for example, when the inventory level looks dangerously low, or when the buyers appears to be a great target for some up-sell or cross-sell opportunities. It should be obvious that we can represent this order-management capability of the business using some business processes, events and services. Of course, we could have considered a wide variety of business capabilities and come to a similar conclusion. So, it should be natural to combine events, services processes to create many of the capabilities that a business needs. And, hence, the pursuit of convergence and unification of event-driven architecture (EDA), service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) within the solution architectures of a certain class of business problems. In fact, this convergence is an essential element of "next-generation SOA". This presentation will recap the essentials of EDA, SOA and BPM, and then will show how they, when applied together, help businesses assemble interesting capabilities while being agile and efficient. Next the challenges of creating such combinations are reviewed from architecture, technology and organizational behavior points-of-view. Contemporary developments in architecture, standards, and tools that make this convergence viable today will be discussed. The presentation concludes with a discussion of relevant best practices and industry experiences. October 22, 2009 - 10:15 Room: Diamond 1 Click Here to View Speaker Profile