synopsis

Although it was not often called out, one of the strongest technology elements that Oracle brought on board when it acquired BEA Systems in 2008 was BEA's BPM technology offering. Now marketed as Oracle BPM, this technology offering now forms the backbone of Oracle's BPM Suite - which plays a strategic role in Oracle's continued Fusion Middleware market push, and also forms a keystone of the Fusion Applications development roadmap. The OBPM technology remains largely on the same technology design and development path as it did prior to the acquisition. It continues to combine a very well-integrated set of Eclipse-based design and development tools (OBPM Studio) with a single runtime server (OBPM Server) and standards-based user interfaces for process participants and administrators (OBPM WorkSpace). It provides strong functionality more or less throughout the entire BPM activity cycle - and where it isn't so strong (in process discovery and analysis), Oracle offers its Business Process Analysis Suite (or BPA Suite - which is based on a licensed version of IDS-Scheer's ARIS Business Architect product) as an option that customers can license.