Business Services Orchestration: The Hypertier of Information Technology

This book fills the gap between the paradigm of 'business processes/EAI' and the real system integration world. Provides a pragmatic yet general approach with plenty of examples using a commercialy available tool. In other words, it gives you the right balance between technology, methodology and business processes.It also walks you through a comprehensive methodology that shows a level of maturity not seen in other books. It is not coincidence that the author is a pioneer in this field.A must have if you need to 'orchestrate' business applications.

I give a 4½ plus. This book is good to have as human service providers are gradually being replaced by digital ones and many enterprises are desperately searching for some loosely-coupled-yet-organized way of "running the show". The authors seem to have a deep knowledge of technology, standards and infrastructure, yet they focus on business benefits ahead of "strong-opinions".As the boundaries between "proprietary development" and off-the-shelf systems are disappearing, "orchestration" of a variety of components becomes even more important.

The book starts out with a high level overview of what technology allows today in terms of automating the orchestration of business services through executable business process models. It goes on to explain the architecture of the BPM tier (Hyper-Tier of IT). It actually describes a full-fledged Methodology to create Orchestrations with a real example. The methodology includes the estimate of the ROI of the projects being analyzed! After the Methodology Chapter, the authors get into substantial detail of the different components of an Orchestration Suite. Very Technical. Finally in the last chapter it all comes together from a technical perspective. It made me re-evaluate my judgement on BPM. I now know that Integration, Orchestration, Workflow need to be one and the same thing under a single process model. The book can be challenging for non-technical audiences after chapter 4. But Business People should not miss chapters 1 through 3.