Oracle released the BPM Suite 11gR1 product in April, 2010. This is part of the 11gR1 release cycle for the Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) family of products that started in the summer of 2009. This release marks the unification of features of the Aqua Logic BPM (ALBPM) product that Oracle obtained as part of its BEA acquisition in 2008, and that BEA had in turn acquired from Fuego, with Oracle BPEL PM, SOA Suite, and the FMW framework. As with all FMW products, BPM Suite 11gR1 follows the guiding principles behind the FMW products: complete, integrated, open, and best-of-breed in its Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) offering. At the time of the BEA acquisition, ALBPM was an industry-leading BPM product – the BPM Suite 11g release preserves and enhances the best of ALBPM features such as ease of modeling, simulation, and basic process analytics. It also adds a significant set of capabilities that leverage other synergistic products from the FMW family, such as strong support for backend integration, event handling, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration, extended process analytics and actionable insights, and superior performance, scalability and system reliability.
With BPM adoption, organizations aim to generate high-value business benefits via increased efficiency, visibility, and agility. However, often such initiatives fail to produce satisfactory results due to a variety of reasons—certain limitations in their chosen BPMS tool set account for some of these reasons. For example, many BPM products specialize in addressing either human, document, system, or decision-centric projects, or cater to either small departmental projects with simpler GUI but limited capabilities, or large enterprise deployments that have complex and fragmented IDEs and execution engines. Also, traditionally BPM tools with enhanced features for developers have been difficult for business users to use. A key goal of Oracle's BPM Suite 11g offering is to eliminate such barriers to successful BPM adoption by providing a comprehensive and unified BPM product that addresses all flavours of BPM projects, provides the best tools for every persona engaged in the BPM lifecycle, and evolves seamlessly from simple projects to more complete scenarios.
Typical BPM solutions involve the modeling of complex human interactions, business rules, and connections to a variety of IT systems. Such solutions also need to incorporate security policies, exception handling, and the handling of business events. These applications are commonly deployed as distributed applications. To get maximum productivity and value from these projects, in addition to a good product you need a good understanding of the applicable software tools. To help you in understanding the tools better, the BPM Suite product management team has put together this getting-started tutorial.
The authors of this book have been instrumental in defining and designing the product, and creating, delivering, and rolling-out BPM Suite 11gR1 training programs internally and externally to partners and customers. In this book they take a step-by-step approach to incrementally building a non-trivial BPM application. They utilize a broad range of product features providing click-by-click guidance at every step. If your goal is to get started quickly with BPM Suite 11gR1, you will find the content and style of this book highly appropriate. BPM Suite 11g is a best-in-class product with an eye to the future, and I hope you will enjoy working with it.
Michael Weingartner
Vice President, Product Development
Oracle