In-Memory Business Process Management

In-memory databases have become a mainstay of enterprise computing offering significant performance boosts for OLAP and OLTP workloads as well as improved prospects for application integration through an efficient, shared database layer. Despite significant R&D investments into in-memory data management, limited insights are available on the impacts of middleware platforms for application integration, i.e., How they need to evolve to leverage in-memory database capabilities. This paper provides a first exposition into how in-memory databases impact Business Process Management, as a mission-critical model-driven application integration middleware. Through it, we discuss how in-memory databases will render some prevalent uses cases of BPM middleware obsolete, while opening up prospects for tighter application integration, better process automation performance and some entirely new BPM capabilities such as process-based application customization. To validate the feasibility of an in-memory BPM, we develop a surprisingly simple BPM runtime embedded into SAP HANA and providing for BPMN-based process automation capabilities.