But an important human interaction component to BPEL allowing, for example, a bank manager to approve a loan in a banking application, will not be in BPEL 2.0. This component is being proposed for a future work, said Dieter Koenig, a senior technical staff member for IBM workflow products. IBM has written two whi tepapers on the concept, which has been referred to as "BPEL4People."

BPEL4People allows for human user interactions to be modeled as part of the business process, Koenig said. The technology would be layered on top of BPEL.

An analyst was highly critical of BPEL for lacking this functionality.

"While BPEL is a good first start, and having better programmatic control will make BPEL 2.0 better, the fact that it doesn"t have any support for human workflow is actually a serious, and in some cases fatal, flaw of the spec," said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an email response to questions. "Most companies have processes that involve some extent of human workflow, and they are looking for SOA solutions that enable that workflow."

"Since BPEL can only do automated orchestrations in its current state, the spec is a non-starter for many firms, or at the very least is relegated to certain niche applications of SOA," Schmelzer said.

Oracle, for its part, is discussing options on BPEL4People with IBM and customers to try to gauge the benefits of options for deploying the technology.