Oracle Workflow - Statement of Direction and BPEL

Hi,
I am starting to study Oracle BPEL and other people at my company are studying Oracle Workflow.
Recently I found the following article at the OTN, regarding the Statement of Direction of Oracle Workflow:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/workflow/workflow_sod.html
It finishes saying:
"As Oracle BPEL Process Manager provides out-of-the-box features for building human-based workflows, rules-based process automation, and integration style business processes, further development on OW4J will not continue and OW4J will not be released.
Any new or existing customers who wish to build business processes in the middle tier are recommended to use Oracle BPEL Process Manager."
So my question is: Does Oracle BPEL provides (or will provide) all the functionality implemented in Oracle Workflow ? If not what are the main differences ?
I will be waiting for your thoughts
Thanks,
Claudio.

Site mentioned above is an internal site. External site is http://otn.oracle.com/bpel
I think the above highlighted SOD is about Oracle initiative to re-write current pl/sql based Workflow engine in Java so that it can ported to middle-tier. Since the acuisition of Collaxa they seems to be dumped that idea and positioning Oracle BPEL as the middle-tier process orchestration (BPM) solution.
Having said that let me take a shot at comparing Oracle Workflow and BPEL products....
Oracle Workflow
* No way getting dropped as Oracle EBS has huge investments in it
* Oracle Fusion Applications has plans to use the Oracle Workflow BES functionality extensively
* Good for modeling business processes within a single DB/application instances. It's possible to integrate with external apps but not an elegant solution
* Web Services can be a functional activity with in the work flow but again not an elegant solution. Requires DB java, queues and a listener
* Doensn't provide sophisticated modeling artifacts like TaskManager, Faults, sensors etc out of the box. It's possible to build your own library.
* Better performanent if the entire process interaction is within a single instance like Oracle EBS account generators, approval flows etc.
* Based on proprietary technology
Oracle BPEL
* Based on standards like BPEL, WSDL and WSIF
* What ever you can do in workflow can be done in BPEL but not the otherway round
* Has adapters to interact with various transports like JDBC, AQ, JMS, JCA, HTTP. That means integration with existing workflows is very easy
* Interation with Oracle AQs seem to be trivial as there is a native JCA based adapter for it
* You may get performance hit because of the multiple connection points. You may be loosing performance but gaining in flexibility
Overall Oracle BPEL seems to be the way to go if your business process involves multiple applications.
HTH
Rajesh

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