Tony Baer from OnStrategies livened up BPM Think Tank 2007 with his talk, "BPMs are from Venus -- SOAs from Mars." With that phrase, Baer is basically saying that business process management (BPM) provides a top-down, business-side approach to enterprise application development, while service-oriented architecture (SOA) takes a bottom-up IT approach. And they haven't met in the middle yet, so there's still a disconnect. "It's hard to find BPM folks who are not talking about SOA, and vice versa," Baer said. "And of course, if you use BPM tools, I doubt that you'd continue using one that didn't let you expose your processes as services."
