OASIS Unit to Promote Business Process Spec

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards last week formally announced the formation of a technical committee to promote a standard for interoperable business processes and business process execution for Web services orchestration.

The committee is known as the OASIS Web Services Business Process Execution Language, or WSBPEL, technical committee. The group, led by IBM, Microsoft Corp., BEA Systems Inc., Siebel Systems Inc. and SAP AG, will work to advance the BPEL4WS (BPEL for Web Services) specification.

BPEL4WS is an XML-based specification that deals with Web services-based business processes.

IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Siebel and SAP will officially submit BPEL4WS Version 1.1 to OASIS under royalty-free terms on May 16, when the technical committee meets to consider submissions of related technology or standards efforts, OASIS officials said.

Other companies that are involved with BPEL4WS and are members of the WSBPEL technical committee include Commerce One Operations Inc., E2open LLC, Electronic Data Systems Corp., Intalio Inc., NEC Corp., Novell Inc., SeeBeyond Technology Corp., Sybase Inc., TIBCO Software Inc., Vignette Corp. and Waveset Technologies Inc., among others.

Derick Townsend, chief operating officer at OpenStorm Inc., said his Austin, Texas, company already has a Web service orchestration product, called ChoreoServer, that supports the BPEL4WS specification. "We obviously believe that BPEL will become the de facto Web service orchestration standard," Townsend said.

Intalio, a San Mateo, Calif., provider of business process management systems, said it provides full support for BPEL4WS 1.0 and the Business Process Modeling Language specification. Company officials said native support for BPEL4WS 1.1 will be included in the next release of Intalios core product.

BPEL4WS competes with another prominent standards effort. And some see the submission of BPEL4WS to OASIS as a controversial move in that it runs counter to existing efforts to standardize this space. Sun Microsystems Inc. and Oracle Corp. support the Web Service Choreography Interface specification, as does BEA.

BEA is in both camps. And the World Wide Web Consortium has a group at work on a Web services choreography/orchestration specification, which does much the same thing as BPEL4WS.

Microsoft attended the first face-to-face meeting of the W3C choreography working group, which was held at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, Calif., but the company did not pursue it further.