According to industry observers, business process management in conjunction with a service-oriented architecture will spawn a platform that unites and aligns business and IT around business processes.
"Everyone is charting to go to a world where things are aligned around business processes, with a platform that enables the automation of processes and provides visibility into those processes," said Gary So, vice president in the office of the CTO at webMethods, Inc.
That platform, according to Microsoft's vision for its BizTalk Server, will be a unified process server that brings together both human and system workflow and federates business processes end-to-end. And central to that vision is SOA, according to Oliver Sharp, general manager in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft.
