Oracle BPM Suite : Oracle BPM vs Oracle BPEL PM

Question

Hi All,
I am new in Oracle BPM and how some experience learning how to use Oracle BPM. Now when reading about the components products inside "Oracle BPM Suite" in detail , I am some what confuse about :
1) In What situation that we should use "Oracle BPM" rather than "Oracle BPEL PM" ?
2) In What situation that we should use "Oracle BPEL PM" rather than "Oracle BPM" ?
I am confuse about these issue since both of the products come together when we order "Oracle BPM Suite" and both of the products can be used for "HUman Workflow Applications" as well
Could you please help clarify these issues ? Thank you very much in advance.
Best Regards
Pearapon S.

Answer 1

Hi Pearapon,
You’ve raised a good point.
Every once in a while, I see an article written by a BPM pundit that attempts to make the case that the BPMN approach (Oracle BPM uses this) is superior to the BPEL approach or vice versa. Here's one example on InfoQ - http://www.infoq.com/articles/bpelbpm. Its title "Why BPEL is not the holy grail for BPM" is very misleading. This is a typical example of an author sitting in either the BPMN or BPEL camp criticizing the other camp's standard. In this article, the author attempts to indict all BPMN to BPEL conversion attempts based on the author's poorly drawn process.
Although I know that controversy boosts readership of these types of articles, in my opinion it’s not a “vs.”. Both the BPMN and BPEL standards have strengths when used with certain use cases.
Here’s one scenario where Oracle BPM and Oracle BPEL PM are synergistic. My background is with Oracle BPM, but I’ve used Oracle BPEL PM on a project for the orchestration of composite services. I used Oracle BPM to model the business processes understood by executives, managers, subject matter experts, business analysts and developers. Using the same simple role based activity flow process diagram, everyone understands what the business problem is and how the process will work solve the problem. The Oracle BPM Automatic activities in the process hit Oracle BPEL processes. Here we used the BPEL processes to hit and orchestrate the underlying IT components . We exposed the BPEL processes using the customer’s service bus and we invoked it from the Oracle BPM process’s Automatic activity (Oracle BPM -> OSB -> Oracle BPEL). Alternatively, If the customer had not had a service bus, I could have invoked the BPEL process directly from the Oracle BPM process via a cataloged web service in Oracle BPM.
Hope this helps,
Dan