History of IBM BPM
Understanding IBM Business Process Manager really requires that one should look at the path that IBM has traveled to get where they are today. If a person doesn't have an understanding of the market and product evolutions, some aspects of IBPM will seem odd or strange. Let us start in 2005 with the release of an IBM product called WebSphere Process Server (WPS). WPS was the previous Business Process Management product from IBM. It was designed to meet all of the customer's needs from a BPM perspective. Its core design followed a Service Oriented Architecture paradigm. What that meant was customers would have "business services" and those services could then be aggregated together to build "business solutions". Practically, a "business service" would be an application or coarse grained functional component that exposes itself as a reusable service. This is normally exposed as a Web Service, although almost any technology to execute such a service could be used. Now, if we could build out a set of re-usable services and describe the rules that govern the execution of these services, we would have a solution.
Historically, such rules had been described in application code with the likes of programming languages like Java or C#. By the time WPS came along, a new player in the story had arrived. This was an open and industry standard called Business Process Execution Language, or BPEL. BPEL promised to be the core glue that would solve all Business Choreography needs. Without (yet) going into detail, think of BPEL as a language that described the order in which steps of a process would execute including branching, variable updates, and more. This language could be visualized in a flow chart style diagram. The WPS product provided IBM's implementation of BPEL. Coupling together WPS, its SOA integration capabilities, BPEL and a host of other functions, IBM brought a product to market that appeared to solve the majority of BPM problems.
Unfortunately, despite IBM's best efforts, WPS did not capture 100% of the market. Competitors arrived on the scene and market share became split between IBM and others. What also became apparent was that the expectations of customers was changing. IBM had seen BPM as being extremely closely married to SOA principles and that manifested itself in many aspects of WPS. Competitors were focusing much closer on the Business Users and not as deep on the technology users. WPS was arguably the most powerful SOA engine in the market but its leanings were distinctly technical. Business users couldn't sit down at its development tooling—a product called WebSphere Integration Developer—to describe or capture their business processes.
To combat this issue, IBM manufactured other products like IBM WebSphere Business Modeler (Modeler) that was targeted at business users. Even though modeler was good for describing business processes, it was independent of WPS, requiring migration work from the model right through to WPS for execution. Changes reflected in the process made by technical staff in WID had problems being brought back into Modeler. Something needed to change.
A 3rd party company called Lombardi marketed a product called TeamWorks which was a stiff competitor to IBM's WPS. In 2010, IBM acquired Lombardi and the product previously known as TeamWorks was re-named as WebSphere Lombardi Edition (WLE). The first release of this occurred in June 2010 with the 7.1 release. In December 2010, the WLE 7.2 version hit the streets. Although the transition from TeamWorks to WLE was rather transparent, from time to time the old name of the product shines through. This is especially true for the names of packages and variables that still start with "tw" for TeamWorks.
1. IBM BPM 7.5, April 2011
- Introduction: First release, merging the WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Process Server.
- Key Features: Single platform to model, run, and monitor; refreshing UI; better integration.
2. IBM BPM 8.0, July 2012
- Key Features: Adoption of IBM Process Designer for BPMN modeling; enhanced mobile support; enhanced large-scale performance.
3. IBM BPM 8.5, June 2013
Key Features: IBM BPM on Cloud, improved case management, integration with IBM Blueworks Live, developer tools enhanced.
4. IBM BPM 8.5.5
June, 2014
Key Features: Performance Improvements; Enhanced development and deployment tools; Improved Mobile and Social BPM
5. IBM BPM 8.6
June, 2016
Key Features: IBM BPM Express for SMBs; Support for microservices and containers; New Process Portal.
6. IBM BPM 18.0.0 (March 2018)
— Enhancements: Enhanced support for cloud-native deployment.