Whats the Difference Between BPM and BPEL?
BPEL (or Business Process Execution Language) can be considered a subset of BPM. BPEL provides a semantically rich language for creating business processes that are composed of SOAP-based web services. It is a specification for how to materialize a business process that is composed of SOAP-based web services. BPEL, by itself, has no specific provisions for human activity-based tasks or queues (though the emerging BPEL4People will address some of these deficiencies), which are typically associated with workflow-based BPM processes. The BPEL standard also does not specifically address reporting, analysis, or monitoring, though some BPEL vendors have augmented their offerings to include such features. In other words, BPM represents a product offering whereas BPEL is a standard focused on web service orchestrations. BPM Product Evaluation Criteria As you recall, we discussed general criteria for evaluating open source SOA software. There are obviously some additional BPM-specific criteria
