BPM is a central concern inside of SOA and the webMethods BPMS 7.1 release demonstrates exactly how far these products have come in terms of creating deployable business processes rather than diagrams of lines and boxes that serve no purpose other than to gather dust on some forgotten shelf.

High marks for innovation, functionality and SOA enablement pushed webMethods BPMS 7.1, released in October 2007, to the top of the service design and modeling category.

Business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities inside the product enable users to perform process improvement. The Eclipse-based, codeless design environment allows business professionals to engage in process development with IT outcomes. In many ways, this product succeeds in enabling service orientation because the itself has been built on SOA principles.

"The amount of functionality that can be leveraged in this product is truly impressive," wrote one judge. "They've pulled together a powerful set of tools that you once upon a time had to buy piecemeal. The result is a product that truly blends BPM and SOA rather than places them next to each other for marketing purposes."

webMethods also features metadata management (for dependency tracking and analysis), rich user interfaces (many using Ajax), semantic Web capabilities and broad support for different message and orchestration types.

BPMS 7.1 offers an entry-level package for a single process project or as a per-CPU full license with no project restrictions (this also includes the webMethods ESB, which is a co-winner in our service assembly and integration category).