At the JavaOne 2004 Conference, Oracle announced the immediate availability of the Oracle BPEL Process Manager, provided free on the Oracle Technology Network for download and evaluation.

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is being developed within the OASIS Web Services Business Process Execution Language Technical Committee, chartered to continue work on the business process language published in the April 2002 Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) specification.

Based upon Oracle's acquisition of Collaxa Inc. and the Collaxa BPEL Server, the Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides a "complete Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and integration platform, makeing it easier for organizations to coordinate Web services and automate business processes."

The Oracle BPEL Process Manager "is a new addition to the Oracle product portfolio, enabling enterprises to model, deploy and manage BPEL processes. It comprises an easy-to-use BPEL modeler, a scalable BPEL engine, an extensible WSDL binding framework, a monitoring console and a set of built-in integration services (transformation, user task, java embedding). It offers native and comprehensive BPEL support, ease-of-use, and cross-platform support."

The Oracle BPEL Process Manager, "hailed as the best BPEL implementation on the market, enables organizations to easily implement adaptive transactions and collaborative business processes based on composite applications. The solution includes an engine for executing business processes, a console to monitor, manage and debug business processes and a rich graphical interface to design and build business processes."

"With its native BPEL engine, Collaxa provided organizations such as the European Space Agency, SAIC and British American Tobacco the most open means for executing business processes written in BPEL. When coupled with Oracle Application Server 10g, this native BPEL engine completes Oracle's comprehensive SOA and integration platform."

Oracle BPEL Process Manager Overview

At JavaOne 2004, Oracle announced its newest product offering, the Oracle BPEL Process Manager, which lets companies orchestrate and execute Web services and business processes. Oracle BPEL Process Manager is the first product to deliver native support for the critical Service-Oriented Architecture process standard, which reduces the cost and complexity of integration projects while increasing their strategic value. Oracle BPEL Process Manager, based on the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services standard, is a result of Oracle's acquisition of Collaxa Inc.

Ensuring 100 percent portability and reuse of processes, Oracle BPEL Process Manager delivers a production-level, deployment proven solution for implementing the BPEL standard. This proven process standard not only speeds the deployment of integration projects while reducing costs, but enables rapid redeployment of best practices. Without a standard process technology, merging or redeploying processes — for example, in the consolidation of two business units — could take weeks or months.

The BPEL standard, managed by OASIS, is the cornerstone of process orchestration and execution within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). As many leading organizations adopt SOAs to reduce development time and costs, BPEL will provide core process orchestration capabilities. Together, SOA and BPEL deliver a modular, efficient, and effective way for IT departments to save time and reduce costs in the deployment of new solutions, decrease maintenance costs, and quickly adapt to changing business requirements..."

There is a constant pressure for businesses to interconnect their applications. This is what is driving the adoption of web services and SOA as an enterprise blue print for reducing the cost and complexity of integration initiatives. Making web services work is a two-step process: first you publish and then you orchestrate. Publish means taking a part of a existing system and exposing it as a service. Orchestrate means composing multiple discrete services into an end-to-end process flow. BPEL is the industry standard for orchestration.

Orchestrating a set of services into an end-to-end process flow entails a new set of technical requirements (binding to heterogeneous system, synchronous and asynchronous message exchange patterns, data manipulation, flow coordination, exception management, undeterministic events, compensating transactions, side-by-side versioning, in-flight instance management and auditing). The goal of BPEL is provide a richer and yet simpler abstraction/standard for addressing those requirements. Although it is a fairly new standard, it leverages from 10+ years of research and development Microsoft and IBM invested in XLANG and WSFL. 3. What is orchestration? What does it mean to build composite applications? Why would anyone want to? Existing systems are not going away. Yet enterprises need to build new applications that can leverage the functionality encapsulated in those existing systems. The notion of a composite application is based around the idea of building new applications by wiring together existing building blocks. Orchestration plays an important role in this picture because it is the glue that coordinates the execution of each discrete service. A good orchestration server needs to be reliable, scalable and render the BPEL process logic with very high fidelity.

Why is native BPEL important? Historically, every time a standard has been adopted (SQL, J2EE, LDAP, SMTP/POP/IMAP, HTML, etc.), native solutions have won. It is because native solutions are less complex, faster and offer richer functionality. It is also because re-architecting an engine around a new abstraction is very difficult, especially if you have an existing install base that you need to maintain and evolve in parallel.

Oracle is a very active member of the OASIS BPEL committee. With more than 6,500 developers using the BPEL Process Manager, we are at the forefront of the adoption of BPEL and can circle back the feedback we are collecting to the committee. Oracle is also actively involved of peripheral specifications: WS-reliability, WS-messagedelivery, WS-context, WS-security, JSR-208/Java business integration. All these standards are coming together to transform the internet into a messaging/integration backbone. They will therefore play a very important role in the adoption of BPEL..." [from the Feature article and FAQ]

From the Oracle Announcement 2004-06-29

Oracle today unveiled the industry's first and most complete Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and integration platform, featuring Oracle BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) Process Manager. Through its acquisition of Collaxa Inc., Oracle gained technology that makes it easier for organizations to coordinate Web services and automate business processes.

Oracle's integration solution enables organizations to easily deploy open, flexible business processes that leverage existing information technology (IT) assets to quickly adapt to changing business demands. Building on the business process management and Web services capabilities in Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle now boasts the most complete integration solution, including Web Services, SOA and BPEL support, Business Activity Monitoring technology, rules engine, Business Process Monitoring and traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). Using Oracle BPEL Process Manager and the entire Oracle integration solution, companies can leverage standard Web service interfaces and portable business processes to reduce the cost of integrating business applications.

Oracle's BPEL Process Manager (formerly the Collaxa BPEL Server) supports the industry-standard BPEL specification backed by Microsoft, IBM, SAP and BEA, and widely recognized as an enterprise blueprint for reducing the cost, complexity and inflexibility of integration projects. Oracle BPEL Process Manager, hailed as the best BPEL implementation on the market, enables organizations to easily implement adaptive transactions and collaborative business processes based on composite applications. The solution includes an engine for executing business processes, a console to monitor, manage and debug business processes and a rich graphical interface to design and build business processes. Similar to other Oracle technology products, Oracle BPEL Process Manager adheres to open standards and can be deployed on any J2EE compatible server...

"Service-oriented business applications — the key to delivering real-time business processes — depend on effective use of Web service standards," said David Smith, research vice president and fellow at Gartner. "Gartner believes that BPEL will emerge as the leading industry standard for Web service orchestration and coordination of business processes."

"We see both potential and demand for the BPEL standard and an execution engine such as the type Oracle is providing with the BPEL Process Manager," said Bobby Soni, vice president and global solution leader, Integration Services, BearingPoint, Inc., one of the world's largest business consulting and systems integration firms. "Oracle has worked on a number of standards over the years that have addressed issues throughout the industry. BPEL is an extremely important standard as it relates to interoperability, building flexible integration and business process automation solutions for our clients."

"With Oracle's grid computing platform, organizations can allocate IT resources to address spikes in utilization requirements," said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president for Oracle Application Server and Application Development Tools. "Further building on this capability, Oracle BPEL Process Manager enables organizations to quickly respond to changing business requirements and reduce the cost and complexity of enterprise application integration projects."

Oracle Application Server 10g, the first grid enabled application server, is an integrated, standards- based software platform that allows organizations of all sizes to be more responsive to changing business requirements. Oracle Application Server 10g features full support for J2EE and grid computing, built-in enterprise portal software, high-speed caching, business intelligence, rapid application development, application and business integration, wireless capabilities, Web services and more, all in one package. Because Oracle Application Server 10g is optimized for enterprise grid computing, it enables customers to realize better availability of their IT systems and lower hardware and administration costs.