Oracle and metastorm

Hi,

I'll hold my hand up - I've had lots of experience with Metastorm, a little with Oracle SOA and I've touched on Oracle BPM although it was Lombardi BPM when I last seen it which is some time ago so it may have moved on somewhat.

As most of my experience is with Metastorm BPM and this is what our business focuses on I may be somewhat biased, however I'll try to be as impartial as possible.

One of main the differences with Oracle's offering and OpenText's MBPM is the stack that they reside on - Oracle you’re looking at Java app engines where as MBPM firmly focuses firmly on Microsoft's .NET platform. If your organisation has chosen a particular stack to adopt and support this may be a key influencer.

When we looked at Oracle BPM some years ago it was more or less as capable as Metastorm's BPM offering (if not more so in some area's) however the nature of the process design and build tasks was much more developer focused and needed an experienced Java programmer. At the time this was the opposite approach to Metastorm BPM where processes could be built with little programming experience however Metastorm BPM (MBPM) has now adopted a much more .NET and C# focussed environment so whilst you can develop a process with little programming experience (through the use of wizards) in reality it really does benefit from a designer with a good understanding of .NET. Oracle have continued to push the acquired platform down the programmer focussed route and continue to integrate it with their other offerings so from what I understand from developers much closer to both Oracle BPM and MBPM, if you develop a process on both platforms you will find it quicker to develop and deploy in MBPM.

Oracle SOA in my understanding is a different beast entirely and we encountered it with one of our existing clients. Their main core applications run on Oracle (ERP, Finance etc..) but they also run MBPM. A couple of years ago they brought in a consultancy to run a PoC with Oracle SOA for interfacing systems and the Oracle Finance and MBPM systems were chosen as the ones to link. We worked with the consultancy to link up the Metastorm side of the integration and get everything up and working successfully communicating via web services however after an initial success it was pulled out 12 months later.

The SOA platform whilst being very capable at orchestrating web service, database transactions etc had no built in front end that could be used by "normal" users. It did have an admin console but this is focussed purely for the technical staff. I'm sure you could use another product to construct more user friendly screens but it doesn't come out of the box and to be fair this is because the product isn't focussed at normal users, but orchestrating and managing the transfer of a large number of system messages.

The system was eventually canned and the MBPM system is now tied directly to the Oracle Financials system. The integration is simple as you can go direct to the database, or via web services. In this case we went directly to the database. It allowed the MBPM system to keep ownership of the transactions success or failure, meaning that it could respond immediately to any exceptions raised.

The reason Oracle SOA was abandoned wasn't due to costs or capabilities (it was fulfilling a different niche to MBPM) but due to lack of user knowledge and experience. As processes had been deployed when there were exceptions to be handled, or if the servers had to be brought down for maintenance etc the on-site team simply didn't have the knowledge to confidently and efficiently handle things - everything had to be passed back to the consultancy as it was a more complex environment than originally anticipated.

Both Metastorm BPM and Oracle BPM are niche skills and although both are based upon common technology platforms you may be confident in your .NET or Java abilities it would make sence for you to consider purposely cross-training inhouse staff within the product you choose.  There is a significant mind-set differenece from a "process" developer to a traditional "coder" so to help with this transition I'd recommend bringing in either an experienced freelancer, a technology partner or the suppliers PS team.  This will shorten the learning curve and allow you to put in place best practices for your environment.

This is the key point, whatever platform you decide to adopt you need to take ownership of it and actually commit to it through staff training and potentially engaging with a technology partner to help kick off you initial projects to drive the adoption of best practice.  You also need to consider the long term support requirements that you will need and put a plan in place for this. All of the platforms mentioned can be great successes but you need to be able to back them up with real skills and a commitment to support a user community so they get great results. If you fail to do this the product will fail too.

I'm sure other users on this form may have more / different thoughts that can be added but of you have any particular questions feel free to ask.

Best regards,

Paul.

Ovum did an excellent series of reports on BPM that looked at all the top players and the differences / pros and cons.  My previous company purchased the reports.  Metastrom BPM come out very favourably in the report although I never saw Metastorm reference these reports.

Hi Magnus,

I'd be very interested to understand more about the capabilities of your Oracle Fusion integration library.  Can you please send some details to achopra@opentext.com?

thanks,

Ari