Finacle from Infosys recently unveiled its standalone Islamic Banking Solution, which addresses the complexities of Shariah compliant banking in today's environment by offering banks greater flexibility and quicker innovation. Finacle Islamic Banking Solution is powered by the BPEL and BPML compliant workflow engine. This, coupled with high parameterization capabilities, results in greater process efficiency, better risk mitigation, significantly lowered TCO and supports rapid roll out of Shariah-compliant products.

Several of my customers are small independent start-ups that are heavily involved with OSS. Just recently a Web Service integration highlighted the amount of Java code necessary to broker interactions with external partners. The decision was made to examine the OSS marketplace for an ESB and BPEL development tools. I will be examining the BPEL Project from Eclipse, Apache ODE and Apache ServiceMix. I was very suprised at the quality of Apache CXF and its inclusion in the ServiceMix container was one of the factors in proceeding with this evaluation.

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.