What is BPEL really ? And what are process component models ?

I included a very simple description of what BPEL really is in my article "Process Component Models: The Next Generation In Workflow ?", published at InfoQ. Basically the article is about different forms of workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) and it tries to demystify some of the common misconceptions around BPM. And at the end, a new approach to building embeddable runtime engines is introduced: Process component models. With process component models, it's possible to serve the different forms of workflow and BPM by executing multiple process languages natively on top of one core simple state machine library.