"The problem with the BPEL spec is that it still doesn't support the human aspects of workflow well, and it approaches composition of services from a programmatic perspective, leading some to believe that BPEL is simply another way of coding processes using XML rather than a programming language," Schmelzer said. More work will be required to make BPEL more declarative to support ad hoc processes and more abstract choreographies, he said.

But a BusinessWorks user said he looked forward to BPEL 2.0. "It'll help us standardize on a notation within all of the tools that we use," said the user, Steve Polaski, director of IT enterprise architecture at Qualcomm.

The company uses BusinessWorks for transformation and mapping functions and also as a Web services container. "We've written some SOAP services that actually execute in BusinessWorks rather than in [an application server such as IBM] WebSphere or Oracle Application Server," Polaski said.

Aside from BPEL 2.0 support, BusinessWorks 5.4 includes the capability to defer to an external security authorization mechanism such as Entrust, Netegrity, and SiteMinder. Also featured is visibility into atomic transactions for improved transactional monitoring.

Native 64-bit operating systems supported by version 5.4 include Solaris x86, Solaris 10, HP-UX, and AIX. The new Windows Vista OS is not yet supported, however.