Quick recap on ESB, BPEL and BPM

I came across repeated queries around ESB, BPEL and BPM. Oracle's SOA suite AS11 provide all of these as a comprehensive and well integrated product suite. If someone wants to logical group the components separately to reposition them in these categories then it could be like:

ESB Enterprise Service Bus
Fabric, Mediator, Binding Components, Adapters, MDS, Policy framework and a registry
ESB essential deals with message routing and mediating between different application services. The mediation could be different transport protocols, different handshake protocols, different standards, etc. At the heart of ESB, there is a message router and transformer. ESB can be service oriented or message (in a form of an event) driven. SOA suite AS11 supports both Service and Event patterns.

BPEL Business Process Orchestration
BPEL is a service engine in SOA suite.
BPEL does process orchestration of web services. Oracle's BPEL comes up with Human task service to support workflow patterns. It also uses Oracle's Business Rules to inject dynamic decision points in a process. Though BPEL can implement most of the patterns of ESB (VETRO), it would not be good for light weight bridging between services to implement service virtualization. BPEL's key strengths is in providing a standard language for process execution with key functionalities like: correlating async interactions, providing a flexible flows, compensations for the long running processes, eventHandlers for out of the band interactions, and wait for timeout/wait activitities etc.

BPM Business Process Management
BPA for Business Process Modelling
BPM runtime for BPMN/XPDL (on roadmap after the acquisition)
Human Workflow and Advance Approval Management
BAM Business Activity Monitor for real time dashboard
Rules for dynamic busines
Web Center for Collaboration


Governance
Registry
Repository
Policy Manager
Console

Oracle strengthens Enterprise Apps GRC: Governance, Risk and Compliance

On October 9th, 2007, Oracle announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire LogicalApps, a leading provider of automated Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) controls for enterprise applications. The transaction is expected to close by November 2007. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.

LogicalApps solutions enable customers to automate GRC activities, such as enforcing proper segregation of duties in enterprise applications, reducing fraud with continuous monitoring of business transactions, and providing defensible evidence of a proper control environment. LogicalApps solutions already are optimized for Oracle Applications, with hundreds of successful deployments.

With LogicalApps' automated control capabilities, Oracle plans to extend its GRC application suite after the closing to deliver a closed-loop solution that manages both enterprise-wide GRC processes and enforcement of automated controls within one system