Technology Briefing:
Business Process Integration Systems

Business Process Integration (BPI) is shifting from a tactical to a strategic issue. According to the market research firm Forrester Research, by 2002 companies expect 78 percent of their customers and 65 percent of their trading partners to demand global electronic connections with them.

Business Process Integration is about defining, enabling and managin

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g the exchange of information within the organization and beyond organizational boundaries. The central focus of Business Process Integration is the business process, not application glue.

Business Process Integration is a strategy that strengthens your organization and its relationships with other organizations by integrating entire business processes not only within your organization but also with your customers, suppliers and business partners (e.g. logistics providers).

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The sharing of business information among diverse business systems enables your organization to streamline operations, reduce costs and improve responsiveness to demands of customers and trading partners. BPI provides integration on two levels: integration across various units of an organization and cross-organization.

Business Process Integration Systems (also called Business Process Management Systems (BPMS)) are complex product suites, allowing for the definition and mapping of processes, the development and deployment of processes, process execution (brokering), administration, monitoring and reporting. The primary technologies being used to accomplish Business Process Integration include Web Servers, Application Servers, and Business Rule Engines.

Demand for BPI product suites will be ever increasing over the next few years. As always, some product vendors offer sophisticated solutions while others just re-label their existing products and make them appear as BPI suites. However, product feature sets are quite different. It is far from easy to cut through the thicket of vendor-specific vocabulary. Already today, some 20+ software companies present themselves as BPI product suite vendors.

The Technology Briefing

• Analyzes current and emerging technologies and standards in the Business Process Integration (BPI) space in order to provide a solid basis for strategic planning and for product evaluation. The report covers a wide range of technologies, such as Business Collaboration Protocols (e.g. ebXML) and Web Services and related (emerging) standards (e.g. UDDI, SOAP, WSDL);
• Identifies shortcomings and weaknesses of current and emerging standards and technologies;
• Discusses key developments and trends setting the stage for inter-enterprise business collaboration.

The intended audience of our Technology Briefing includes IT managers and business analysts who want to gain a comprehensive technical overview on Business Process Integration Systems and the current state of technology.

Given the dynamics of advancing technology, the Technology Briefing is available as a one-year subscription only. We plan to update the Technology Briefing several times a year and make new versions available about every three months.