• Recently submitted to OASIS for development, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) for Web Services specification defines a standard approach to orchestrating the interactions between Web services in an automated business process
• A sponsor member on the OASIS technical committee developing the specification, Novell to contribute its expertise having already delivered the first commercially available Business Process Manager based on WSFL - a predecessor to BPEL

LOS ANGELES (Gartner Web Services and Application Integration Summit) — May 6, 2003 — Extending its leadership in the support and development of open standards, Novell today announced plans to implement the emerging Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) specification in a future release of its Novell exteNd Composer Process Manager, the business process manager that ships with Novell's flagship Web application development product suite, Novell exteNd. Previously the work of a few independent vendors, BPEL for Web services was recently submitted to OASIS for development and Novell will be playing an active role in shaping the emerging standard as a member of the BPEL technical committee.

Novell brings unique experience to the OASIS BPEL technical committee through its acquisition of SilverStream Software, the first vendor to provide a commercially available Web Services Flow Language (WSFL)-based Business Process Manager. BPEL is largely based on WSFL and a related specification, XLang, and promotes an intuitive process model that improves on existing workflow architectures. BPEL is also designed specifically for Web services and features native integration with complementary Web services standards such as SOAP and WSDL.

"The basic Web services standards provide a key that enables us to unlock information stored in the disparate systems that comprise our IT infrastructure, but the ability to combine those services into complex business processes has been critical to our success," said Howard Cheung, CIO of ACER in Europe. "One of the key reasons we chose to use the Novell exteNd Composer Process Manager is because it was based on WSFL, and now that BPEL has emerged as the successor to WSFL, we're pleased that Novell has pledged its support."

Novell's implementation of the BPEL specification will follow the standard's release from OASIS and will be featured in a future release of the Novell exteNd Web application development suite.

Press contacts:
Shawn Dickerson
Novell, Inc.
Phone: 801-861-2932
E-mail: sdickerson@novell.com