BPMS, BPMN, and BPEL meet the “Mainframe”
I was recently contacted by a customer who started the discussion with “I was looking at this BPMS tool that uses a BPMN 2.0 modeling with BPEL execution to create a business process and I need to include an IMS transaction, how can I do that?” Well after trying to decode all the acronyms in that question I asked him what he needed. They had started using a very powerful tool (ActiveVOS www.activevos.com) and were putting together some very interesting business processes, and inevitably he ran into process that needed information from the mainframe. After researching and talking to the guys at ActiveVOS, we realized that a web service that was created in Ivory Service Architect could easily be included into a business process (as a partner link) into ActiveVOS flows. We created a simple IMS service in Ivory we turned the WSDL over to the designer in ActiveVOS, and in about 5 minutes that flow was invoking the service. We went on to create more complex services in Ivory that involved calling multiple IMS transactions in one service( a mainframe composite service), and again it only took a few minutes before that service was part of a business flow. So, two groups, that spoke their own languages, were able to easily and quickly create business services involving diverse architectures including the mainframe applications.
From that discussion the two companies put together a joint webinar showing how these two products and ideas were easily melded into true business solutions. So now I know that BPMS is (Business Process Management Suite), and BPMN is (Business Process Modeling Notation) and BPEL is (Business Process Execution Language) and all they need to know is that talking to mainframe is easy via a WSDL in Ivory Service Architect. That webinar is at www.vosibilities.com “Leveraging mainframes for BPM success”.
