What is Business Process as a Service (BPaaS)? — The BPaaS Definition 📝
The tech and software industry has a long track record in bundling and unbundling technologies to create growth. The reason why it has been so successful is the simple concept of abstracting complicated features and tasks into different layers. These layers can be combined and are also used to build on each other. That’s what happened to Cloud Computing. You don’t need to run the hardware on your own, it got abstracted away so you can focus on what really matters for you: Running your code. This created the cloud models we all now. Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. Is this the end of abstraction? I don’t think so. A new model called Business Process as a Service can be stacked on top of the SaaS model utilizing all layers below to provide companies with predefined, ready to scale, best-practice processes.
What is a business process and how is it defined?
Just to define a common understanding for a business process. A business process is a set of activities and tasks linked together to achieve an organizational goal like delivering a product, service, information, or decision to an internal or external customer. The process is in a constant control loop which measures if the wanted outcome got achieved and how it can be done more effectively. The process can have multiple inputs but is always trying to achieve a single objective. The chain of processes of a company aims to add value and separate company A from company B in the market. Basically is a process capturing meta-information itself. By defining the required inputs to achieve a specific output, it is possible to model, analyze, and finally optimize those processes which is called business process management. Processes differentiate themselves from workflows as in workflows are repeated activities to finish a task, while a process has repeated activities to finish an organizational objective like hiring an employee or producing a good and can include multiple workflows.
What the heck is Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) and how is it defined?
Gartner defines BPaaS as “…the delivery of business process outsourcing (BPO) services that are sourced from the cloud and constructed for multitenancy. Services are often automated, and where human process actors are required, there is no overtly dedicated labor pool per client. The pricing models are consumption-based or subscription-based commercial terms. As a cloud service, the BPaaS model is accessed via Internet-based technologies.”
The following characteristic define BPaaS offerings:
- BPaaS is an extension of the cloud service model and is another abstraction layer. It abstracts away the Business Process Management, configuration, and implementation.
- BPaaS is configurable based on the process design.
- BPaaS needs well-defined APIs like any other service such it can easily be connected to other services.
- BPaaS needs to handle massive scaling customer- and process-wise.
- BPaaS is responsible for designing and operating the whole business process lifecycle like SaaS does for the application lifecycle.
- BPaaS combines SaaS technology with Business Proces Outsourcing (BPO).
How does BPaaS fit into the current cloud model with IaaS, PaaS, SaaS?
BPaaS is like SaaS a packaged cloud offering. BPaaS is designed to be service-oriented and needs well-defined interfaces to interact with other services as well. Below you can see the well-known cloud delivery model. With one distinction. The business process layer on top. This makes sense because enterprises deploy applications to create and maintain business processes. The evolution of SaaS is to manage the business process as well and abstract it away that companies can concentrate on there core business.
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