Applying a BPM and SOA Approach to Achieve Agile Business Integration

Every day, IT professionals struggle with agility, how to support new business processes, how to adapt to changing conditions, and how to improve execution efficiency. Business Integration encompasses both the procedure and technology for transforming technical capability into business agility.

From the business perspective, SOA-based Business Integration starts with a defined business objective and its associated processes. As for the challenge of flexible yet enterprise-class Business Integration infrastructure, SOA can naturally leverage the enterprise service bus (ESB).

BEA offers a 360-degree solution that delivers the benefits of cooperation, visibility, governance, time-to-market, and enterprise-class quality of service (QoS) to the challenge of Business Integration. The goal of Business Integration from the business perspective is to provide process participants agile business process management on top of atomic business services.

An Enterprise 360 approach to Business Integration maximizes benefits while minimizing risks. Clearly, enterprises must achieve and maintain alignment of IT capabilities with business goals. Flexibility is important. However, this alignment naturally requires coordinating resources across many organizational unites over extended periods of time. Applying SOA to Business Integration delivers both flexibility and manageability.

An ESB serves simultaneously as a backbone that bestows flexibility and as a gateway that promotes manageability. The business works top-down to figure out what business services it needs on the bus. IT works bottom-up from existing assets to put those business services on the bus.

The ability to measure the difference between which services are needed and which services are available also improves manageability. For development, BEA's Business Integration solution provides the business the tools it needs to describe how processes should execute.

BEA is leading the charge towards agility with industry-leading products, practices, and people committed to implementing Business Integrations across the enterprise.