In the past couple of weeks, two major reports on "The State of BPM in 2008" were published. The first one was based on a survey filled by 274 respondents and published by BPTrends.com. The second one was based on analyst reports, articles and a survey of customers and was published by BEA...BPTrends reports that a wide variety of process standards are being used by the respondents. BPMN shows the strongest momentum with 41% (from 22% in 2006) and BPEL showing a modest progression with 26% (from 23% in 2006).

One of the many goings on at this week’s HR-XML technical meeting in Atlanta, was a “birds of a feather” on business process modeling and employee on-boarding. Of course, we know from past explorations of the topic, that BPM tools are great fit for employee on-boarding, background checks, and similar HR processes which mix calls to internal and external web services and require handling of relatively complex dependencies and logical branching. Microsoft’s John Evdemon, delivered a nice WS-BPEL overview at our Nashville meeting.

DataDirect Technologies, a Progress operating company, has announced DataDirect Shadow mainframe-to-SOA integration support for IBM's new System z10 mainframe. DataDirect Shadow version 7 is claimed to be the only mainframe integration platform capable of diverting SOA and data workloads from IBM's general purpose mainframe processors to the more economical z specialty processing engines.