Microsoft Forms Business Process Alliance, Develops BPM Roadmap

Microsoft is honing in on business process management with the formation of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance and the release of a BPM roadmap that will include a key standard—Business Process Execution Language—in the Windows Workflow Foundation.
The company announced Feb. 26 at the Gartner BPM Summit in San Diego that it has formed the Microsoft Business Process Alliance, a group of about 10 companies dedicated to building out BPM functionality on Microsoft's BPM platform.
The companies include IDS Scheer (a key process modeling partner with SAP and Oracle), Fair Isaac, Global 360, Metastorm, Ascentn, SourceCode Technology Holding, AmberPoint, InRule, PNMsoft and RuleBurst.
The goal of the alliance is to break down barriers to BPM deployment—particularly for small and midsize businesses—by providing a less expensive BPM technology deployment option for companies, Microsoft officials said.
"The business process management space has become a classic case of the haves and have-nots between very large enterprises and the rest of the industry," said Steven Martin, director of product management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft, in a statement.
"The formation of the Business Process Alliance serves as a great opportunity for a wider range of customers to adopt game-changing business process management technologies."
The way Microsoft plans to lower the cost of BPM is by integrating those technologies companies need to automate processes on its BPM platform.
Click here to read more about IBM working to align and integrate CBE concepts into its business process management capabilities.
That platform is composed primarily of BizTalk Server, which has capabilities for system-centric processes and rules, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 that has human-to-human and human-to-system capabilities through document collaboration, workflow design (in the SharePoint Designer) and through its integration with the 2007 Office System that includes Word and Excel. more information

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