Before moving to the wonderful world of the consumer Internet, I have built, for about fifteen years, mission critical systems in the financial services market - in which you spend a ton of time (and money) integrating “stuff”: front-office to back-office, buy-side and sell-side, transaction processing to risk management, etc. Originally using FTP or manually-written socket-based message transfers, these integration projects gradually started using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) frameworks such as Tibco's ActiveEnterprise. These frameworks generally started by offering a messaging layer (a Message Oriented Middleware), on top of which were built gobs of features such as message transformation, rules and workflow management, portals, distribution and supervision frameworks, etc. Back in 1999/2000, a new element was added to the stack: Business Process Management, that was supposed to bring together business analysts and process experts on one side, and developers on the other: analysts would draw process diagrams that would automagically be turned into executable processes that developers could deploy within the enterprise, and across enterprise boundaries.
The concept was interesting, and a number of startups got funded in the nascent market (Lombardi, Fuego, Intalio, Savvion,...) that proved to require more time (and more money) than expected to mature. I became friends with Ismael Ghalimi, the co-Founder of Intalio, and made a small personal investment in their Series B back in 2001. Whilst I am not too sure of the “marked to market” value of that investment, Ismael's insights on the BPM and software stacks at large have been most valuable to me over the years. It is therefore good news that he has decided to start a blog called IT|Redux that covers Business Process Management and a lot of surrounding technology. The latest post describes the “open sourcing” of the Intalio framework, an interesting read:
Intalio has now transformed itself into “The Open Source BPMS Company.” Step One was the acquisition of FiveSight Technologies, the company that brought to market the first open source implementation of the BPEL 2.0 specification. Embedded by major open source projects such as the ServiceMix Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and leading development tools like Sun's Java Studio Enterprise, the FiveSight PXE BPEL 2.0 engine – rebranded Intalio|BPMS – is effectively the most widely deployed BPEL product today. Intalio is planning to continue the development of the BPEL engine under the open source Common Public License, and release its BPMN process modeler and BPEL4People workflow component under similar open source licenses later in 2006. The Intalio|BPMS Open Source Edition includes these three components plus open source ESB, integration adapters, and rule engine. Its customers will be mainly independent software vendors, who will embed the engine and tools into their own end user offerings.
If you have never heard of EAI, no worries: the more modern lingo is ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), etc.
Tags: BPM
Good to see that Intalio is showing leadership in the BPM space by open sourcing their framework. This should give them a lead ahead of the pack....
Posted by: James | December 19, 2005 at 03:24 AM
We are a microsoft shop looking in to the BPMS space and are evaluating the following 3 vendors,
1. Meta Storm
2. Selcian
3. Bluesprinf software
Does any one have any experience with these vendors ? We have had some demos of the Selcian BPMS software and it seems to have the functionality we need. Have scheduled with the other vendors. Any comments and guidance would be appreciated.
Posted by: Francois | March 19, 2006 at 10:41 AM