In the early days of BPM (four or five years ago) everyone thought BPEL was the BPM standard, at least for runtime execution. Not long after, the importance of business-friendly process modeling came to the fore, and BPMN emerged as the standard for that. The mismatch between graph-oriented BPMN models, where you can route the flow just about anywhere, and block-oriented BPEL, where you can't, didn't seem to worry BPM vendors. After all, a model was just a model, a business requirements document in diagrammatic form.

Iona Technologies is updating its Artix and Fuse SOA product lines, which feature the Artix closed source enterprise service bus and the Fuse open source technologies.

Iona offers a distributed approach to SOA that supports combinations of open source and closed source software. "We could call that the hybrid approach," said Eric Newcomer, Iona CTO.

The combination of business process management (BPM) with service-oriented architecture (SOA) is driving modeling for application development, said Steve Hendrick, group vice president of application development research at Independent Data Corp. (IDC).

Commenting on this week's release of model-driven SOA tools by Telelogic AB, he said, "I don't see where if you want to address SOA in a scaleable way, you can go down that path without support for modeling."