Standards bodies and software vendors are putting the finishing touches to a number of web services specifications that could revolutionise the way firms collaborate.

The standards relate to XML, a language used by businesses to model enterprise data that has become an instrumental part of web services.

While the technology that underlies each of the new specifications marks up data similarly to XML, its capabilities go far beyond XML's.

"This is something weird and different," said Howard Smith, chief technology officer at Computer Sciences (CSC) Europe. "It's not web services, it's not the reinvention of workflow, it's not process management workflow, it's new.

"It unifies those things. It's like taking the best of every other paradigm and building a new model."

The Business Process Mark-up Language (BPML) is published by the Business Process Management Initiative, a group backed by dozens of major IT vendors, including BEA Systems, CSC, SAP, and Sun Microsystems.

It released the first draft of the language in August. Compared with XML, BPML lets users model a company's business processes from top to bottom.

It allows a company to define every action in a complex business process, from sending a price bid to executing a purchase and shipping goods. If every company did this, it would become interchangeable.

Two companies that want to team on an order, a project or a transaction could interact at the process level to perform different parts of common procedures.

BPML will do to processes what spreadsheets did to data: let companies treat them as definable objects that can be changed or linked to other processes with a simple point and click.

"What we're saying is, if you want to link and change, and do so aggressively, you're not going to do it based solely on traditional middleware and processes," explained Smith. "You have to treat processes as if they're data.

A consortium of businesses, including BEA, IBM and Microsoft, is developing a rival standard known as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL).

The first draft was born in August, when IBM and Microsoft brought IBM's Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) and Microsoft's XLANG to create the new standard.

Paraic Sweeney, IBM's vice president for business integration, said that the specification is similar to technologies such as Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and Java.

ODBC and Java Database Connectivity provide a standard way of talking to a database, independent from the developer that produces it, according to Sweeney.

The same thing has occurred in application development and application servers with Java 2 Enterprise Edition. But in the whole business process space, there hasn't been that level of standard implemented.

Yet having two standards (BPEL and BPML) will probably compromise the goal of getting everyone speaking the same language. Sweeney insisted that he's confident the two standards will merge.

But Smith believes that BPML will win. "They're setting a standard, which kind of fits existing technology, so it can be more easily adopted. But it doesn't give the full capabilities people are looking for," he explained.

It's unlikely that users will care about how business process computing works, as long as it does. "Our clients aren't interested in these esoteric standards issues. They just want to get on and manage their processes," said Smith.

So software vendors are building products that exploit the various standards. Siebel Systems has already built support for IBM's WSFL into its Universal Application Network, a web services-based system that integrates its customer relationship management software into other applications.

"We're seeing a shift in the way applications are designed," said chairman and chief executive Tom Siebel. "What we're going to deliver isn't screens of reports; it's descriptions of business."

Along with Microsoft, Siebel is pushing BPEL as the key standard for that revolution. Versions of the Universal Application Network due next year will support the specification. "This is the next generation of computing languages," claimed Siebel.

CSC is implementing the languages into its software. Later this year, its e3 architecture will include a business process management engine capable of interpreting BPML. IBM also is planning to use the technology.

Users are excited about the technology as well. DHL International has been developing business process models for nearly a decade, according to David Norton, methods manager for DHL Systems, the company's IT unit.

© 2002 CMP Media LLC

FURTHER READING
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Howard Smith and Peter Fingar's book on the new revolution in business management is available for $31.96.

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