BPMI.org Press Release

INDUSTRY LEADERS PUBLISH STANDARD FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Release of BPML Specification Paves Way for Implementations

Las Vegas, NV. - March 08, 2001 - Marking a breakthrough development in the evolution of business process management, the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) announced at their member meeting today the public release of the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) specification.

BPML is a meta-language for the modeling of business processes, just as XML is a meta-language for the modeling of business data. BPML provides an abstracted execution model for collaborative & transactional business processes that span multiple applications, corporate departments, and business partners, behind the firewall and over the Internet. By covering the multiple dimensions of business process management in the open enterprise, BPML will bridge the gap between legacy IT infrastructures and emerging business-to-business collaboration protocols such as RosettaNet, ebXML, and BizTalk.

BPML empowers all participants involved in the process design, deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization to manage business activities in a process-oriented fashion, while preserving the integrity of end-to-end business processes all over their lifecycle. BPML enables the collaboration of process participants in a reliable, scalable, and secure way, by supporting dynamic process topologies that allow the boundary between processes and participants to be determined on-the-fly by long-term and real-time business goals, while retaining synchronized public interfaces associated with trading partner agreements.

Several BPMI.org members, ranging from software vendors to consulting firms, have expressed plans to incorporate BPML into their products and services. BPMI.org foresees BPML implementations in such enterprise software as process design tools, process repositories, process servers, process administration tools, process optimization tools, and many process-specific applications.

Today’s public release comes after several revisions and six months of collaboration between members of BPMI.org. The BPML specification draft version 0.4 is now available for download at www.bpmi.org.

About BPMI.org
BPMI.org (the Business Process Management Initiative) is a non-profit organization that empowers 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 mission is to promote and develop the use of Business Process Management (BPM) through the establishment of standards for process design, deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization. BPMI.org develops open specifications, assists IT vendors in marketing their implementations, and supports businesses in their use of business process management technologies. BPMI.org has been initiated by Intalio, Inc. and created in August 2000 by a group of sixteen enterprise software vendors and consulting firms. Membership is open to all companies, non-profit organizations, and individuals.