Business process as a service - status and architecture

Abstract

A Cloud Service is usually classified as Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service or Software as a Service. This classification ist not sufficient, when Business Processes are considered. Therefore, Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) as next level of abstraction is in discussion. BPaaS is already an important topic for analysts and cloud providers. In the scientific community a discussion about BPaaS has been started. This contribution presents a literature analysis of the current state-of-the-art in BPaaS. In order to investigate how a Business Process can be built on top of a cloud service, a prototpye of an external application is presented, which is built on top of a cloud service using a RESTful API. For the realization of BPaaS existing architectures for cloud computing are discussed. A proposal for an advanced Architecture for Business Process as a Service is presented. Based on these findings, a brief outlook on future research questions concerning Business Process as a Service is derived.