News

IT interest in Java BPM changing with the times

• By Rich Seeley
• July 20, 2004

Finding increasing interest in business process management (BPM) among corporations, Oak Grove Systems is seeking to expand the market for its business process engine (BPE) from ISVs to enterprise customers.

When Calabasas, Calif.-based Oak Grove was founded in 1998, BPM wasn't on the radar of most corporate IT departments, recalled Chuck Ames, the company's CEO. So the start-up concentrated on sales to ISVs who understood the value of adding Oak Grove's 100% pure Java BPE to their business software offerings, he said.

But in the post-Enron world of SarbOx and increasing government regulation, Oak Grove discovered growing interest in BPM among corporate IT departments, which Ames, perhaps only half joking, says are interested in keeping their CIO out of jail.

'Early adopters are looking at the pain points,' he told JDT. Most specifically, they are looking to BPE to not only facilitate and enforce business practices required by new regulations, but also to provide an audit trail so a company can show documentation where necessary that it is following the rules, Ames said.

Oak Grove is in beta with Reactor 6.0, its BPE product targeted at the enterprise market. Among the new features is a Web services-enabled capability for spanning .NET and Java applications. Ames said this is important because either through acquisitions or because different IT groups within an enterprise preferred working on either Java or Windows platforms, most potential corporate customers have a mix of the two apps.

With SOAP and other Web services technologies, Ames said, 'It turned out not to be that difficult' to create a BPE that spans Java and .NET. Where two different Java-based systems are involved, the Oak Grove software can also employ Java APIs, he noted.

Implemented in 100% pure Java with RMI, EJB, XML and SOAP APIs for integration flexibility, Reactor 6.0 is designed to fit into an enterprise's existing infrastructure, including database (JDBC), directory (JNDI), security (JAAS), application server (J2EE) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), according to Oak Grove documentation.

The product will be released in three configurations, according to Ames: Reactor Enterprise for the corporate IT market, Reactor Professional for developers and small workgroups, and Reactor Embedded for ISVs.

Further information is available at http://www.oakgrovesystems.com/ .