OASIS Members Form New Committee to Advance BPEL4People

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

OASIS Members Form New Committee to Advance BPEL4People 
http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2008-02-14.php

Active Endpoints,  Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, Sun Microsystems,
Software AG, and Others Collaborate on Extension for Web Services Business
Process Execution Language for Human Interactions

Boston, MA, USA; 14 February 2008 –  OASIS, the international open standards
consortium, has formed a new technical committee to extend the Web Services
Business Processes Execution Language (WS-BPEL) to support human interactions.
The new OASIS WS-BPEL Extension for People (BPEL4People) Technical Committee
will expand the capabilities of WS-BPEL to support a broad range of human
interaction patterns, allowing for additional modeling of business processes
within the language. 

WS-BPEL 2.0, which was approved as an OASIS Standard in 2007, introduced a
model to support automated business processes based on Web services. The
standard is now widely used for orchestrating machine-to-machine interactions. 

"WS-BPEL was not designed for human workflow," noted Jeff Mischkinsky of
Oracle, convenor of the OASIS BPEL4People Technical Committee. "Nevertheless,
we realize that many business processes comprise a broad range of activities
where people are directly involved. Whether performing tasks, reviewing
actions, approving steps, or entering data, people are a key part of many
workflow scenarios."

BPEL4People will define a new type of basic activity that will allow human
tasks, including their properties and behavior, to be defined, as well as the
operations used to manipulate those tasks. A BPEL4People coordination protocol
will control autonomy and life cycle of service-enabled human tasks in an
interoperable manner.

"BPEL4People demonstrates WS-BPEL's promise of extensibility," said James Bryce
Clark, directory of standards development at OASIS. "Being able to represent
human interactions as well as automated service exchanges is a powerful
evolutionary step.  We expect that building on WS-BPEL, rather than developing
an entirely new specification, will be most welcomed by the marketplace."

OASIS members will build on version 1.0 of the BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask
specifications, which will be contributed to the Committee by Adobe, Active
Endpoints, BEA, IBM, Oracle and SAP. Other contributions and changes to these
input documents will be accepted for consideration and evaluated based on
technical merit and conformance to the Committee's charter. 

BPEL4People will be offered for implementation on a Royalty-Free basis. The new
technical committee will hold its first meeting by teleconference on 5 March
2008. Participation remains open to all companies, non-profit groups,
government agencies, academic institutions, and individuals. Archives of the
work will be accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS will offer a
mechanism for public comment. 

Presentations on BPEL and other SOA-related standards will be the focus of the
upcoming OASIS event, 'Open Standards 2008: Composability within SOA', which
will be held 28 April – 1 May in Santa Clara, California. 

OASIS also recently introduced BPEL XML.org (http://bpel.xml.org/), an online
community gathering place and information resource for the standard. 


Support for BPEL4People

Active Endpoints
"Active Endpoints looks forward to participating in the OASIS BPEL4People
Technical Committee and contributing to the extension of BPEL to include human
tasks. As one of the authors of BPEL4People, we very strongly believe that no
visual orchestration system is complete without the ability to flexibly
integrate people as part of the overall application. By formalizing the
BPEL4People specifications, OASIS is ensuring that BPEL itself will continue to
be the most effective way to drive services-based application adoption," said
Chris Keller, founder and vice president of engineering, Active Endpoints, Inc.


Adobe
"Adobe is dedicated to creating rich and immersive online and offline
experiences. WS-BPEL Extensions will considerably close the gap between human
behavior and structural business processes and establish standards for
effective process management. Human Task Enablement extends the ability for
organizations to use open-source Flex to build standards-based applications
that are intuitive and interactive. Adobe looks forward to participating within
the newly formed OASIS Technical Committee and standardizing the
specifications," said Charlton Barreto, senior software architect, Adobe. 

BEA Systems
"BEA is pleased that an OASIS technical committee is being formed to
standardize extensions to WS-BPEL 2.0 which are designed to support human
interaction within business processes. This technology can help deliver
significant value to customers and the industry," said Ed Cobb, vice president
of emerging technology and standards at BEA Systems.  

IBM
"We're very pleased to join with our co-authors on BPEL4People, Active
Endpoints, Adobe, BEA, Oracle, and SAP, in forming the OASIS BPEL4People
Technical Committee. This is an important milestone in providing a common way
for vendors to represent the human steps in a business process based on BPEL.
Our customers have told us that it is critical that their business process
management applications be able to address the diverse activities that people
perform, such as review and delegation, in a standardized way.  The BPEL4People
Technical Committee starts the industry on a clear path to an open, widely
adopted industry standard for this important capability," said Karla
Norsworthy, IBM. 

Oracle
"The BPEL4People specification addresses two critical industry needs: providing
a standard workflow language for broad adoption, and enabling a single base
standard (WS-BPEL) to orchestrate both people and systems. Having supported
this architecture for several years in our Fusion Middleware, Oracle believes
its standardization by the OASIS Technical Committee will accelerate the market
adoption of workflow technology and BPM," said Don Deutsch, vice president,
Standard Strategy and Architecture, Oracle. 

Red Hat
"Red Hat is happy to see the emergence of BPEL4People as an OASIS Technical
Committee and intends to contribute actively in this endeavor," said Mark
Little, Director of Standards.

SAP
"SAP is pleased to see that OASIS is further enhancing the BPEL specification
and encouraging broader adoption of this technology. Through BPEL4People,
modeling of service-based and human interactions will be unified, thus driving
further adoption of enterprise-class SOA for critical business applications,"
said Michael Bechauf, Vice President, Industry Standards at the Global
Ecosystem and Partner Group, SAP.

Software AG
"The BPEL4People and related WS-HumanTask specifications fill major holes in
the area of human interaction that existed within the original WS-BPEL 2.0
specification. These extensions to WS-BPEL 2.0 target the unique needs of
complex business process orchestration with embedded human interactions so that
they can more fully support the 'ad hoc' process orchestrations that are
critical to the continued evolution of BPEL-centric BPM. We are pleased to
co-submit these specifications to OASIS and co-sponsor the formation of the
BPEL4People TC. Software AG is committed to open standards as a means for
ensuring interoperability across heterogeneous systems. This is fundamental to
our position as the independent leader in business infrastructure software
globally," said Dr. Peter Kürpick, President and Chief Product Officer of the
webMethods Business Division and member of the Software AG Executive Board.  

Sun Microsystems
"Sun Microsystems is a long-time supporter of and contributor to WS-BPEL 2.0.
Sun supports the standardization of BPEL4People as the next logical step in the
growth of WS-BPEL, bringing work flow capabilities to BPEL's web service
orchestration facilities, and to our customers. And, as always, we are happy to
support this work being done in the open environment offered by OASIS," said
Carl Cargill, Sun's Director of Corporate Standards.


Additional information:

OASIS BPEL4People Technical Committee 
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/bpel4people/

BPEL XML.org
http://bpel.xml.org/

Cover Pages Technology Report
http://xml.coverpages.org/bpel4people.html

Open Standards 2008: Composability within SOA
http://events.oasis-open.org/home/symposium/2008/



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http://www.oasis-open.org


Press contact:

Carol Geyer
OASIS Director of Communications
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org
+1.978.667.5115 x209 (office)
+1.941.284.0403 (mobile)