Business process technology and the cloud : defining a business process cloud platform

The present state of the integration between business process technology and the Cloud is vague and not well defined. Industry research organizations predict that enterprises will be moving in both these directions in the next few years. This will increase the need for a clear integration between these two areas. Apart from this, many current problems with automated business processes stem from the poor connection between business application systems and the needed business process support, as processes are still hardcoded in application logic. In this paper, we first give an overview of the technologies that deal with business processes and the different flavors of related architectures in the IT world. Furthermore, we present a summary of what the Cloud is and what models revolve around it. We compare the different reference architectures for Cloud Computing offered by industry and academia according to their levels of aggregation and abstraction. We extend the concept of Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) into the concept of Business Process Cloud Platform (ProCPlat) and propose four scenarios that cover the different types of process definition and process enactment ownership. Finally, we discuss how industry makes choices concerning projects that involve both process technology and Cloud Computing technologies. We believe that our proposal for ProCPlat is a first step towards an easy and manageable platform for business process support in the Cloud.