The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) has been created by 16 founding companies, including Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, and VerticalNet, to standardize the management of mission-critical business processes that span multiple applications, corporate departments, and business partners. The XML-based standards generated from the initiative will support and complement existing B2B collaboration protocols such as RosettaNet, BizTalk, and ebXML, as well as technology integration standards including J2EE and SOAP.

The first deliverable of the BMPI will be the specification of the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML). BPML is an XML Schema that provides a standard way to model mission-critical business processes. By covering many dimensions of business process modeling that are specific to processes deployed internally to the enterprise, including business rules, security roles, distributed transactions, compensating transactions, and exception handling, BPML will bridge the gap between legacy IT infrastructures and emerging B2B collaboration protocols such as RosettaNet, BizTalk, and ebXML.

The BPML will enable the enterprise to model, deploy, and manage business processes such as order management, customer care, demand planning, product development, and strategic sourcing. This will allow the IT infrastructure to enable the adaptive enterprise that can manage constantly evolving business processes.