Tibco’s next release of its BPM modeling tool Business Studio is adding BPMN (Business Process Modeling Language) support. The goal, according to Matt Quinn, vice president of product strategy, is converging the worlds of SOA and BPM closer together.

It’s part of a new strategy to unify the company’s BPM and SOA-related products, which constitutes about 80% of its offerings. The strategy, branded Tibco One, outlines a common framework that will bind Tibco’s BPM product (which came from the Staffware acquisition) plus its Active Matrix service fabric; BusinessWorks ESB; its application adapters (from its EAI offerings); BusinessEvents complex event processing; master data management; and its mainframe and B2B tools.

For its part, Tibco Business Studio 2.0 is providing a more integrated user experience, so you don't have to export a model to execute the process. It is intended as the BPM modeling tool that acts as the process IDE to all of the product lines.

Business Studio 2.0 enables a developer to retrieve a data about a service from a registry, drag onto a process modeling screen, where it can be modeled in BPMN and annotated to provide higher level views to business analysts, who can then tweak or reconfigure the process. And the info that accompanies the process model can display context, such as which are the most important data fields that must be filled in during the course of executing the process.

BPMN is an OMG specification providing a notation for modeling business processes. And because of that, it shares a relationship with UML that allows creation of data domain models from UML that can illustrate the data that is associated with a business process.

And with BPMN support, Tibco’s process modeling tool can import models from other tools such as Microsoft Visio or IDS Scheer’s ARIS. And the tool has a lightweight source code control vault that allows developers and business analysts to check in, check out, and share process models.

Eventually, Tibco One will provide various workflows between the various pieces of its product lines, which will be rolled out in phases. Not surprisingly, the first phase, which will involve developing a common user interface shell that accesses these products, is set to roll out over the next 12 – 15 months. Initially, it the new UI will extend to ActiveMatrix, BusinessWorks, and the EAI adapters. The next phase will target the messaging products, master data management, complex event and rules processing; while the last phase of UI convergence will extend to the mainframe offerings.

“The goal is to decouple the user interface with the different process and integration engines,” explained Jeff Kristick, senior director of product marketing. In the long run, there will be back end shared metadata, and directed process flows. It’s not that all the products will necessarily run together. For instance, the mainframe product will not run on ActiveMatrix, but there will be common UIs, process definitions, and in some cases, directed workflows linking the two.

Don’t mistake this for one big grand product unification strategy. Given the variety of Tibco’s products, one size clearly won't fit all. Tibco realizes that the most prudent ties come in at the UI, and selectively, with workflows that might bridge certain development and deployment platforms.

And it's not force-fitting a single grand unification technology.

For instance, while some of its tooling is Eclipse-compliant, applying the Eclipse plug-in strategy would have proven too limiting, For instance, although Eclipse is not language-specific, the majority of its tooling is Java-based. Furthermore, Eclipse’s back end metadata sharing is not well developed. At this point, Eclipse tools can plug into a common UI, but in many cases, can’t easily share data.

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