Is everyone on the BPEL bus?

Now that BPEL 2.0 is racing towards standardisation and IBM and SAP have led the way on human workflow with BPEL4People with Oracle apparently closely following the specification and helping to display some of the myths out there and clearly looking to put BPEL at the heart of its product suites. If you look at the BPEL 2.0 group all of the vendors are clearly there, how enaged they are is clearly another question (628 posts involving sun, 15,000 with IBM, 14,000 with BEA, 271 for SAP, 14,100 for Microsoft and 810 for Oracle) but part of the question is how commited to BPEL 2.0 these vendors will be and when we can expect to see BPEL 2.0, and potentially BPEL4People within their product suites.

In a hugely unscientific poll of the various vendors websites we get 22 hits for IBM, a single Blog entry at Sun saying that BPEL 2.0 is the first "open" BPEL, and for the rest BEA has quite a few articles out there, SAP don't have much (two articles) but then that is pretty normal for SAP on technology elements, they've been working with IBM on BPEL4People though, Oracle are much the same with just three hits, but a decent forum thread or two. And then there is Microsoft, with an impressive ZERO hits which is pretty staggering considering they are the co-chair of the group (I tried again on MSN to no avail).

So from the outside it looks like Microsoft are lagging behind on BPEL while pushing XAML, their own interal proprietary schema approach in the upcoming "Windows Workflow Foundation", something that was originally aimed at dynamically creating GUIs.

Clearly this can all change in the next few months as MS begin to announce what is in BizTalk next, and the J2EE based vendors announce their roadmaps. Certainly as a recommendation I'd say companies should be looking to standardise on BPEL 2.0, and whatever becomes the human workflow standard extension, over the next couple of years, it would be a real shame if some vendors left themselves at the bus stop with a single platform solution.