Gone are the days when the IT infrastructure contained separate applications for operations, analytics, and administration. Today's IT infrastructure needs enterprise application suites that can deliver operations, analytics, and administration together, and can collaborate to share information (in real-time), which makes their functioning more efficient. For example, data from operations is used by analytics to detect fraudulent operations, thereby making operations more secure. Further, the future asks for more seamless interactions between these operations.

From a technical perspective, we can see these as a merger of multiple design patterns. We can see systems that efficiently merge service-oriented architecture (SOA) and event-driven architecture. For example, the LAMBDA architecture merges batching, analytics, and service provisioning.

Such convergence can lead to more effective technologies such as predictive analytics. A BPM-based system can be used to produce, consume events, and interact with services. Thus, predictive analytics on these events is an obvious improvement. Moreover, BPMs can be used to take action on the results (or decisions) obtained by using these predictive analytic engines. This can have foreseeable applications in the following domains:

The BLIP, that we have already discussed in Chapter 1, Business Process Modeling – Bridging Business and Technology, is certainly moving to this goal. It provides a way to integrate business logic spread across operations and enable them to work collaboratively to achieve efficient business operations; jBPM is a vital part of BLIP.