I was at the SOA/BPM Conference this week at reading and was watching one of the presentations which discussed the differences between BizTalk and Dublin.
It occured to my that with BizTalk being pitched as the integration product and dublin being pitched as the application server product this means that BAM is strategically misplaced in terms of being within BizTalk.
This is just my opinion but I think that in the future it would make sense to move BAM to be part of the SQL Server BI offering. I think that if it was part of SQL Server then it would expose BAM to more products within the Microsoft space. A summary of my thoughts is:
- It would allow you to easily use it with Dublin as it would be likely you are using SQL Server for persistence and tracking anyway.
- It would still support BizTalk which is based on SQL Server anyway
- It would allow other products which are based on SQL Server to use this without requireing BizTalk (eg: Dynamics)
- It would allow ISV’s to develop hooks into BAM. A number of the ISV products which compliment the Microsoft BPM offering often use SQL Server but not necessarily BizTalk
- In the future it would probably be easier to hook models developed with Oslo into BAM if it was part of SQL Server
These are just my random thoughts and ideas, I have not seen anything from Microsoft which indicates this is a planned direction, but if anyone has an opinion on this feel free to comment below