Never have so many acronyms been as well served at one time as have BPM, BPEL, and SOA by the arrival in the CEO office at Active Endpoints, inc. of Mark Taber, who is adamant that over time Active Endpoints will be able, through simplifying their architecture and helping them with connectivity and security, to transform BPM by simplifying the way it is implemented in the enterprise.

'BPEL has the potential to make BPM easier to implement by adding the flexibility required in a world where collaboration time is measured in months not years,' Taber told SOAWorld Magazine in an exclusive interview.

Again and again during the interview Taber, whose passion for catalyzing change in the software industry is contagious, stressed that everyone is trying to marry BPM and SOA, yet  Service Orchestration really hasn't taken off yet.

"People want to do it," says Taber, "but the enterprise people are under pressure. It's a dynamic world now, in which many partnerships last for less then a year. They're simply stuck when it comes to orchestration."

What’s missing from BPM and workflow today, in Taber's view is simplification and what he calls "consumability."

The latter term stems from his IBM days, when he served as IBM’s Worldwide Business Unit Executive for their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Appliance Division, a part of IBM's Application Infrastructure Middleware Group.

The story goes thus. Taber was VP of Sales at a company called Datapower, which was acquired by IBM in 2005. "At Datapower we simplified things by abstracting the configuration nside of things and putting it into an appliance," says Taber. It was this 'consumability' angle that caught the eye of IBM. With IBM marketing muscle and sales support an approach that had won Datapower 100 or so enterprise customers scaled dramatically.

"The appliance thing took off." 

Taber sees a similar inflexion point on the horizon with service orchestration, a chance to do the same kind of "straight-through processing" that paid such dividends at IBM. "All" that's needed is for architects to understand how to leverage the BPEL asset to orchestrate their services.

"We need to simplify options for our partners and customers who want the best standards-based technology," says Taber.

Active Endpoints, as the preeminent BPEL-focused company, is certainly ideally poised to lead the charge. And with Taber as its new CEO, it seems that SOA-style service orchestration just acquired its new maestro.