BPMI.org and OMG Announce Strategic Merger of Business Process Management Activities

Business Wire, June 29, 2005

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) and the Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)) today announce the merger of their Business Process Management (BPM) activities, to provide thought leadership and industry standards for this vital and growing industry.

The combined activities will continue BPMI's and OMG's ground-breaking work and focus on all aspects of Business Process Management, including:

--Refinement and promotion of BPMI's Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as the basis for business modeling,

--Delivery of BPMI's Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM),

--Business language, vocabulary, and rules,

--BIM (Business Information Management),

--EAI (Enterprise Application Integration),

--B2B (Business to Business collaboration),

--Web Services Information and Processes,

--Security Policy and Management, and

--Refinement, promotion and education of the principles, approaches and tenets of Business Process Management within the broader business community.

OMG will continue its tradition of innovation by integrating and reusing complementary business integration and web services standards such as WS-BPEL from OASIS, WSDL and XML Schema from W3C.

BPMI's Board of Directors, along with the leadership of the OMG's Business Enterprise Integration Domain Task Force, will form the core of a new BPMI Steering Committee, which will provide Business Process Management thought leadership and expertise for the entire industry through education programs, public advocacy, and advice to the combined BPM standards work at OMG.

"BPMI.org has rapidly become a key source of thought leadership in the business process space, and we are delighted at the opportunity to put that leadership and OMG's standards leadership in the same space under one umbrella," said Dr. Richard Soley, chairman & CEO of OMG. "BPMI's thoughtful vision of integrating business processes and IT is transforming the business technology landscape, while OMG's standards efforts to ensure productivity interoperability, portability and technology reusability will provide a strong foundation for this increasingly important activity. Integrating those efforts will bring value to the membership of the merged organization, and to the industry as a whole."

"With this merger, BPMI increases its influence within the standards community and the larger community of process practitioners around the world," said Jeanne Baker, chair, BPMI and vice president, Technology, Sterling Commerce. "Together BPMI and OMG can make process standards accessible and meaningful to a wider business audience."

"We believe this merger to be good for users of BPM technology and we will, therefore, continue to work with OMG in partnership - integrating XPDL with BPMN," said Jon Pyke, WfMC chair. "Furthermore, the WfMC will continue to support and contribute to all relevant and related standards where they apply to BPM advancement."

"The merger will allow Business Analysts, IT Architects and Developers to accelerate business process integration using a suite of MDA and SOA standards rather than the proprietary implementations promoted by some," said Sridhar Iyengar, IBM Distinguished Engineer and member, OMG Board of Directors. "IBM is a leading proponent of business agility through business and IT alignment. We believe the efforts of OMG and BPMI to unify a set of business modeling standards (business process modeling, business rules and business organization - including OMG standards such as BPMN, BPDM, PRR) that integrate with Business Process Infrastructure standards such as WS-BPEL from OASIS are important to our clients' success."

"This integration is the next natural step in the maturity of business process standards and its uses within architecture. Business process standards, including Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), will be strengthened by the strong governance model of the OMG and the technical expertise of their working groups. This move will further strengthen the alignment of business process and IT under the auspices of enterprise architecture," said Jan Popkin, SVP, Telelogic, and BPMI.org board member.

"As an active member of both BPMI and the OMG, MEGA International warmly welcomes the merger of BPMI and OMG. This merger is a great opportunity to join the benefits of OMG modeling savoir-faire and standards to BPMI's expertise in Business Process Modeling. It opens the doors to a wider use of model driven approaches for the benefits of both IT technology and business governance," said Antoine Lonjon, MEGA Product Marketing Director, OMG and BPMI.org contributing member.

About BPMI.org (www.bpmi.org)

BPMI.org (the Business Process Management Initiative) is a non-profit corporation that aims to empower companies of all sizes, across all industries, to develop and operate business processes that span multiple applications and business partners, behind the firewall and over the Internet. The Initiative's core objective is to promote and develop open, complete and royalty free xml-based standards that support and enable Business Process Management (BPM) in industry. BPMI.org embraces existing standards where appropriate, working with complementary standards bodies such as the OMG, WfMC and OASIS. In areas where standards are lacking, BPMI.org focuses on standards development to support the entire lifecycle of business process management--from process design, through deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization.