It is not too late to get in. The webinar will be presented by Ash Parikh from Informatica, and Madan Sheina, Principal Analyst at Ovum. The whole process-driven data integration concept is definitely gaining currency in the marketplace. Informatica and Intalio joined forces a while back to bring BPM and data integration together. Since then we have added our voices to the conversation. We believe this is an important issue where a lot of education is needed to get out to businesses. So we would encourage you to attend.
We recently spotted interest about Intalio in French. Chris Doudet is sharing his experience on our training and his first processes, while at Octo they evaluate BPMN and apparently like our vision (scroll down to the comments for the discussion).
Being French myself I am very pleased to see interest pick up next to home !
Business Technology, the German magazine for, well, technology in business, featured an interview with Arnaud Blandin, Intalio’s Director of Business Development. My German isn’t quite that good so I had to read a translated version (using Babelfish).
In the interview Arnaud talks about how “Open Source permitted it to Intalio to place the conventional sales model on the head” (you have to love automatic translation engines). The ability for Open Source to provide a pay-as-you-go approach to building your BPM project, what we refer to as COSMO (commercial open source model) has proved to be a successful approach for us. Arnaud and BT also discussed the state of the industry today in regards to co-opetition in the Open Source world.
We are hosting a cocktail party at The Great Room, Renaissance Times Square Hotel in New York from 6-8pm on November 18, 2008.
Our CEO Ismael Ghalimi, will be in town so we want to extend the invitation to our friends and colleagues in the area to come join us for drinks and chat about Business Process Management. A number of visionaries in the industry mentioned they would drop by, so I think it will provide some interesting conversation. A great opportunity to talk to others who are going through the same BPM adoption path you are, or have innovated and are willing to share their recipe for success.
If you are interested, let me know either by email jos@intalio.com or by phone (203) 791-0182.
A big part of the Intalio server team, which includes several Apache ODE committers, will be next week in New Orleans at ApacheCon US (November 3rd to 7th). If you’re planning to attend ApacheCon or just happen to be in the area during that period, feel free to contact me and we’ll arrange a meet-up. See you there!
Michael Moon, of the Journal of Digital Asset Management, and Intalio CEO Ismael Ghalimi had an interesting conversation the other day. And lucky for us;) Michael is the editor in chief and was able to capture the discussion for his magazine. SaaS 2.0 onward! is available in the October edition of the magazine.
Ismael and Michael took the long view, going back into history of BPM but also peering into the crystal ball to see what the future holds. Ismael discusses how Software-as-a-Service acts as both a disruptive technology and an enabling ecosystem. The two also got into the role of process orchestration in digital supply chains. Definitely a wide ranging article.
Alex Boisvert, Intalio’s Product Development Director, presented an overview of the Intalio Server at Intalio JapanCon 2008.
Process Engine
Intalio uses Apache Ode as the BPEL engine. This is the leading BPEL engine. It uses only open standards, uses a fully transactional engine, and is embeddable. Processes are tied to memory. There are customers with 200,000+ processes running.
Ode is very scalable. It uses multi-threading and can be clustered. Clustering supports automatic failover. In a clustered environment the database is used as a system of reference. Only minimal node synchronization is required.
Performance depends on:
Message bus
Process design
Process persistance
Event persistance
Hardware software configuration
Usually the database is the bottleneck. Intalio recommends the use of the best database possible to achieve best performance.
Typical server performance on standard server hardware.is 1 million transaction per day on a database persistant server. Non-persistant servers get 10 million transactions a day.
Process management is handled from the bpms console. On top of that there are process query and debug APIs. Process versioning is done as processes are deployed. By default the new version of a process replaces an older version. It is also possible to have custom versioning by using the server API, to control process lifecycle. Human Workflow
The workflow components are a set of components that allow you to define your own workflow rules. There are many choices for user interace creation including XForms (Orbeon), TIBCO GI, Ruby etc.
The available task types for workflow are;
Initiate Process
People Task
Notifications
Provides a full security framework, providing typically AAA functionality, by default the security framework is integrated with LDAP. Server Roadmap and Research
Intalio currently has many features in development. Here are a few:
Simple BPEL - simPEL
Simple BPEL provide an alternative to using visual design tools. It has a simpler syntax. Developers do not need to create BPEL directly. SimpEL is a scripting dialog of BPEL, programmer friendly with a syntax similar to JavaScript. You can mix SimPEL with Java, PHP, Ruby etc.
You could generate BPMN diagrams from SimPEL.
RESTful BPEL
Provides a simpler method of using web services, such as those provided by Amazon, google, salesforce.com etc. Provides the ability to exposing processes as resources.
TAS3
Trsusted Architecture for shared secuirty, a European Union project on how to deal with trust and secuirty, details are available at www.tas3.eu
Feeds
Adding support for BPEL to distribute data on an internet-scale.
Native XQuery Support
Providing a more powerful data manuiplation lanaguge.
Publish-Subscribe
Popular architecture for event distribution, decouple publishers from consumers.
Singleshot
Experimental task manager for process managemen, being developed in Ruby on rails.
Next up in our continuing coverage of Intalio JapanCon 2008 is Bryan Cheung, the CEO of Liferay - the leading Enterprise Open Source Portal.
Within the last ten years the idea of the Enterprise Portal has matured to fulfill the promise of the original value statement.
What Is Liferay
IBM Webshphere and Oracle and BEA Portals. Really when you are looking at Enterprise Portals, there are fewer and fewer players. When Oracle purchased BEA that created a combinate of 4 portals under the same roof. What is certain is that only one of those is going to survive. If you are looking to deploy a portal today, there is a lot of risk.
Liferay has a leg up in that they are the leading Open Source vendor. They are also a competitor to Sharepoint. Liferay provides same degree of collaboration, same Sharepoint functionality but in an open way. Also, social software and collaboration is combining into one category to make knowledge workers more productive. Liferay vigorously adheres to standards.
Customers include NBA, Sesame Street (a favorite of mine) and BMW.
What Business Problems does Liferay solve?
Unify personalization, securit, application/data access and user experience across the enterprise
Quickly create portals, intranets, shared workspaces, web sites and apps
Bring together SOA and Web 2.0
Retain control of your technology and business
In the past Portals have promised more than delivered. Liferay is determined to give as much functionality out of the box to deliver on the original promise and now the technology is mature enough to make it happen. As Ismael mentioned, you are never sure which software is going to survive, and without access to the source code you can never be sure that software will live on. Open Source assures the customer that they always have access to the code to maintain.
Case Studies
HanseMerkur Insurance Group
High availability website - in moving from Web 1.0 to 2.0, we still need to ensure availability but with dynamic content.
Advertising campaigns drove customers to website in waves. Hard deadline set by business because of campaigns. Content was constantly changing. Liferay portal for content publishing with multiple authors. The site went live in 6 weeks. At peak a quarter million pages are served per hour.
Enterprise Integration portal - customer and sales data integrated. Assured online access for entire sales. Single sign on and bringing in a single user experience were key. They received a very high level of acceptance immediately after going live. Adding services quickly is now possible.
Cisco Systems
Wanted to use Liferay for developer network for social collaborative work. Diagram of community of communities, different groups for technologies and solutions. They wanted to foster innovation among partners to accelerate solutions development. They used Liferay to create stickiness and reduced dependence on internal support by providing this community. Phase 1 is building a collaboration platform, Phase 2 will add Business Processes, and Phase 3 is building community enhancement.
Now Bryan goes into demo mode. He shows how easy it was to build a replica of the Nintendo site and compartmentalize the site by creating different articles and combining them on the same page.
Continuing coverage of Intalio JapanCon 2008, next up Ben Bushman, one of Intalio’s Process Experts, delivered a presentation on Business Activity Monitoring.
What is Business Intelligence
BI takes data from the operations and submits it to the managing BPM. BAM integrates BI report design into Intalio|Designer. Serves the report to browsers from Intalio|BPMS.
This is a key part of Intalio|BAM. It enables a special way of storing the data occurring in a process. Process variables are not persistent between process instances. The difference between process variables and external variables is that the data from an external variable is stored in a database and can then be used to display information used in reports to make better decisions. Processes, forms, and reports are created in Intalio|Designer. The business analyst and the IT staff work together to define whatever is necessary in Designer, and then deployed to Intalio|Server. As processes are running, the data is saved to a data store to be used by the report generator. This means that the data is displayed in real-time.
Steps to Create a BAM
Create a metric, something that must be decided at the beginning of the process. When you start designing the process sit down with a high level stakeholder that can define goals and measurements.
Add metric to process as external variable
Create a data source
Define report
Defining variables is a simple operation where you define the name and add specific values and attach a key value, something that identifies it uniquely. The data mapper allows us to track and update the data variable in real-time.
Creating the data source requires knowledge of the target. Intalio can generate the right kind of code for the database you are using.
Defining the report allows you to display the information in the most accessible manner.
Key Performance Indicators are good to put wherever there is a change of state, e.g. from new to revised.
Here Ben went into demo mode. To view a screencast of BAM in action you can go to our Intalio community site.
No other BAM competitor uses external variables. In all the other vendors you have to manually define, select, and map the data. External variables can be simply dragged and dropped into the appropriate area are tracked automatically.
For SAP data business objects, you can drag and drop these the same way. Take the external variable and map them directly into your SAP instance.
Next on the agenda for Intalio JapanCon 2008 is the keynote address from Henry Peyret, the Principal Analyst, Forrester Research. His presentation introduced “BPM Trends for Intalio.”
Has worked on BPM for ten years now, started out with EAI, connectors, BAM, ESBs. Henry started out as any good analyst would with numbers showing how BPM is becoming mainstream. The goal now is to not only make it mainstream, but to make it successful.
Market Trends
Business drivers:
Uncertainty requires agility
End-to-end process optimization, across silos
not only about productivity improvements
Globalization - a single process for everyone
localization - managing variants
According to customers, the most important benefit is increased productivity. But the most important element for Henry is the ability to change processes quickly and easily. This is becoming key for IT because of the changing regulations, changing requirement, changing business environment.
A BPM Center of Excellence is necessary for results. It is a key factor for success not only for measurement but for implementation. There is a strong correlation with a COE and goals being met. Metrics measured right now, productivity, quality, risk, compliance. Need to include measurements for agility as well.
The answer to what type of BPM project is most underway is modeling. They start with modeling and move on, but the maturity is not quite as far along with other BPM projects. The next level of maturity is execution, and the higher levels are process monitoring and optimization. Most customers have dones some sort of execution but have not yet gone further.
Customers need to correlate and monitor internal and external data. If a company is growing 20% which is a good number for that company, but the industry is growing at 40%, there is a better understanding of how well the company is really doing. Instead of just Key Performance Indicators, which should be called Key Productivity Indicators, we should add Key Quality, Agility, and Risk Indicators (KQI, KAI, and KRI). The goal is to recognize that each of these is supplied by different groups - suppliers, employees, outsourcers, IT systems, partners. For contract monitoring each resource involved should inherit global objectives. Contract monitoring is becoming a key area for BPM in the near future.
Software-as-a-Service, it will be important to externalize these processes to partners, across different types of repositories an important aspect of contract monitoring. Choose the right level of BPP that is not too simple but not too complex.
What is next
Dynamic Business Apps. We build applications that are agile, flexible, able to change. Characteristics:
user-centric
process-oriented
flexible
collaborative
context-driven
dynamic - can change in business time without programmers
information-rich
Telco’s originally took 2 years to deliver applications on their platforms. The next generations took 4 months, then 1 month. Now with the fourth generation it takes one week. That is the type of dynamic bussiness application development process that needs to occur now. These apps will represent a fraction of the IT portfolio but will be the most strategic. These Dynamic Business Apps need to be tested.
Recommendations:
Bring a BPMS center of excellence to your organization
BPMS is a good candidate for Dynamic Business Apps
Continue to watch the most innovative BPMS providing competitive advantages
Today is the beginning of Intalio JapanCon, hosted most graciously by our partner Tomoaki Sawada. Our CEO and co-founder Ismael Ghalimi started off the conference with a presentation introducing Intalio|BPP for the first time, the world debut if you will. Ismael posted his own article about the session here. Ismael’s full presentation is available below.
Sawada-san set the stage by welcoming the attendees, and discussing Intalio’s success - over 500 customers, about 50,000 individuals working with our community version, and specifically addressing some of the exciting things that are happening in the Japanese market. Sawada-san mentioned how much Ismael loves Japan and is excited to be here.
This is Ismael’s 10th trip to Japan in a very short time. The market is definitely taking off for Intalio.
Because of the financial crisis in the US and America it presents an opening for Japan to work with SaaS companies to build a worldwide presence.
BPP - Business Process Platform. How can you use BPP to build your SaaS offerings. BPM 2.0 - what does this mean and why should you care?
What problem does Intalio solve? Customers looking for an enterprise have only a few options - IBM, Microsoft, Oracle (BEA), SAP, all are expensive fragmented and closed source. The acquisition of BEA, or indeed any other acquisition, means that some of the products will not be continued. A closed source company that gets acquired - there is no guarantee that they will be around, even large companies and the software can die with them. Open Source Software (OSS) means that the software can be maintained and is available for as long as the customer wants. The Microsoft BPM offering is pretty much only for Microsoft shops, and more companies are moving away from Microsoft. SAP is the same way, only for SAP users. So you have two options left IBM and Oracle. Even these large companies can discontinue products and customers are stuck with software that is no longer supported, end users are no longer able to make changes to that software. OSS gives you the source code which allows you to make changes to your software for as long as you want. OSS means never having to say goodbye.
Intalio Business Process Platform
Same components as the bigger players. Partnerships with other OSS vendors has allowed us to build an integrated platform that rivals IBM and Oracle. It goes beyond BPM it is about building the platform you will use today and tomorrow for creating enterprise applications. You can do this in the cloud or in your hosted environment. We are doing this in a very collaborative model. The software is written in the US, Japan, Brazil, China, the Ukraine, and other global locations.
We take integration very seriously. Other offerings from IBM and others are a patch-work. How are they integrated?
Runtime compnents integrated at the API level.
Deployment supported on the same app server
Installation supported from main Intalio installer
Certified for all platforms (widest array in the business)
Dev tools integrated in an IDE
Unified life-cycle through Intalio|Repository
System admin tools integrated through Hyperic HQ
Authentication supported through Diamelle OpenIAM
Component upgrade supported automated
Internationalization and localization offered for all supported locals
Commercial Open Source Model - COSMO
How do we mix OSS with a way to commercialize the product?
Open Source Code Base - Donated to Apache and Eclipse. We work with large Open Source organizations so that they can promote and manage.
Community Edition - add 10% of code to the OSS software. Free to use but no binaries and no support. The most widely used BPM in the world.
Enterprise Edition - add another 10% of code to the Community Edition. You have the right to the source code and modify it forever. We provide support and maintenance, patch updates, and indemnification. It gives the customer all the benefits of OSS, and gives us IP protection.
Proof that the model looks is the adoption. Intalio has an incremental adoption process. First we engage with our community users through training. Training is sold by email mostly, we have one tele-sales rep. The people giving the training are the ones selling it mostly. We essentially have no sales people. All sales are made by trainers. What that means for the end user is that you will not give us money to pay a salesperson’s salary. Every penny goes to something that gives real value to the company and the software.
User base - we have 50,000 user organizations using our software. Intalio is the most largely used BPM software in the world today. Our customer base took off dramatically when we switched to the COSMO model. Just last quarter we signed 1.26 customers every single day including weekends. We have 30 resellers around the world and today most customers are coming through our partners. Adoption of the software is really driven by our customers.
Intalio|BPP
This is the first time we have talked about the complete story. This audience is the first to hear it. BPP is not just for process, it is about building any application. 20 years ago applications started with the database. About 10 years ago came a new piece of software that helped you build applications on top of that stack - the app server. Moving forward we need that, but we need more and better support for things that move and evolve. You need both data and something very similar to the DB engine for the process. You need a process engine next to the database engine - a BPEL engine. This was the vision we had nine years ago. We turned that vision into something real. Along the way we learned that even though this is the platform there are many different ways you can use the software based on what you want to do. We are building the platform to be used by the business people, the architects, the developers either in the cloud or hosted by you. We started by addressing the needs of the architects or business analysts - Intalio|Designer and a workflow task manager. On top of that we added components to make it a real, scalable, secure architecture - BAM, Portal, ECM, BRE, ESB. These components plus Designer plus Server = Enterprise Edition. Over the last year we got a lot of feedback saying that’s great but what if I want to write code. You have a zero-code single click deploy, but I want to write code. We sat down with them and tried to understand what they need. They like the engine but don’t like BPEL. Too complex. They need something powerful like BPEL but simpler. We developed a new language - SimPEL a simple language based on Ruby a very clean syntax, very small. Semantics are similar but a lot easier to use. We built Singleshot on top of that for lightweight mash-ups, a task manager built on things like REST, RSS, iCal. You can now do load balancing in a mash-up based on availability. For the language we decided not to decide. We allow people to use whatever they want to use - any language. We are providing containers, object binding for whatever language.
Ismael stated that this is a breakthrough because you can keep writing in whichever language you want, whenever you need orchestration, or support for asynchronous things, long-running processes, you code in whatever language you use, Intalio provides the most powerful engine without having to learn it. Much like the database could be used by any development platform Intalio|BPP does that for the process engine. This is the Intalio Developer Edition that was announced several months ago.
Today we announce a new project. several months ago we released Intalio|Server running on Amazon Web Services - Intalio|On Demand. We are now developing four new products - an online BPM Designer running on any web browser, mash-up templates for things like SalesForce.com, an online SimPEL editor, and an online UI developer.
The online BPM designer uses the same standard - BPMN 1.1 - to drag and drop objects via a web interface to design processes.
The beauty of this model is that you can start from one perspective, say a web developer working in lightweight environment, and easily migrate to an enterprise environment.
If you plan on attending you will need to register and attend tomorrow’s BPMN online class, level 1: September 26th. If you have prior BPMN training this class may not be necessary.
BPMN online level-2 training will discuss some very important topics, much of it coming from research and an upcoming book project. We will talk about:
BPMN process patterns for solving business problems
How this is a big leap forward from the Van Der Aalst patterns that simply define possible flows in a mathematical, technical way.
Real-world examples in a simple, easy to understand format.
Process modeling vocabulary: What is a controlling authority? What are participation levels? And more!
Decision management patterns
Turning the “guess work” into a scientific formula that is easily reproduced for any process modeling exercise.
And much, much more!
Even if you already think you know a lot about BPMN, it’s well worth your time to attend this event.
Here is the full list of online classes coming up.
BPMN online class, level 1: September 26th
Provides a good introduction to the BPMN 1.1 specification and how to model processes. Covers all of the BPMN 1.1 shapes and how to use them. Provides a good introduction into the concepts and vocabulary necessary for effective process modeling. Register now
BPMN level 2 class: October 3rd
Provides a practical approach on how to use the modeling notation to accomplish common process modeling problems. Included in this course will be an introduction to over a dozen common BPMN patterns that will help you accomplish your business objectives quickly, accurately, and without the guess-work normally associated with process modeling. Also, there will be an introduction into decision management and a vocabulary that will help your organization be more efficient when communicating about your business processes.
A good, full understanding of the BPMN 1.1 specification is a prerequisite to attend this class. Register now
Process Modeling Framework (PMF) class: October 17th
The Process Modeling Framework (P.M.F.) is a structured approach to process modeling that results in consistent, accurate, readable process diagrams using the BPMN 1.1 modeling notation.
Provides an introduction into a structured approach to process modeling. The methodology and best practices of the experts will be shared in this class. PMF is more than just a methodology - it’s a management practice for processes that involves executives, business analysts, managers, and IT staff. Each part of an organization has different needs for diagramming processes, and long-term management of the processes once they are automated. This course offers a practical guide on how to implement BPMN on a large scale throughout your organization.
Realizing that process are not 1-dimensional, the PMF addresses the idea that multiple people, and systems are involved an a business process. A single, simple diagram does not meet the needs of a large organization. Executives need a different diagram style than managers. IT engineers need a different diagram style than business people. Different levels of detail, different levels of process ownership are all included into the PMF.
PMF also includes a strategy for long-term process management and process governance.
A good basic understanding of the BPMN 1.1 specification is required to attend this session. The BPMN level-1 online class satisfies this requirement, but it is recommended that you also attend the BPMN level-2 class to get the most from this session.
I am glad to announce that the BPMN modeler we develop as part of the SOA Tools project is planning to evolve from the status of component to the status of sub-project.
You can read the announcement here, don’t hesitate to contact us if you are interested to join us!
I just came back from a trip in Johannesburg where I had the ability to demonstrate the capabilities of Intalio|BPMS at BPM Congress 2008 and meet our first South African customers.
It was interesting to hear our users’ confusion as the marketing messages from some of the more traditional vendors in South Africa is very BPM 1.0 oriented. One vendor at the conference even confessed that they were using BPM in their marketing brochures as it was very trendy and their platform was not designed to use the latest industry standards!
On the good news side, many companies had started SOA initiatives and realized that they could just download and test Intalio|BPMS for free to get an idea why BPM is the killer app for SOA. It was also very exciting to get a full room of trainees for our first ever training in South Africa - we even had a waiting list!
Our good partner Shimo IT is currently implementing projects for our users and you should see some follow-up news soon.
A little while back we brought up in our community forum Ismael Ghalimi’s (our CEO) participation in the BT Summit in Bangalore, India. The conference is Sept. 23-24. If you can make it there let us know, maybe we can connect.
Ismael will be discussing BPM’s life after SOA. He has often referred to BPM as the killer app for SOA, and SOA as the enabling infrastructure for BPM. What SOA has become is something synonymous with “Enterprisey”. While there are a lot of tools built around the Enterprise stack, a whole host of developers are left out of the equation - the Web 2.0 crowd.
This presentation marks the first time Ismael will address the new vision for BPM in a Web 2.0 world and what Intalio is doing to build the vision.
There are more than 30 focussed sessions, keynotes and workshops from iconic personalities on the leading-edge of business technology. The summit presents an ideal opportunity for current and prospective users of business technologies to hear directly from thought leaders at the cutting edge of their development.
On Sept. 10-12 we will be heading over to Gartner’s BPM Summit in Washington D.C. If you are going as well please drop by. Process expert Stephen Day and I will be in booth H showing off our latest stuff - BAM, BRE, Alfresco and Liferay Integration, and just geeking about BPM in general (we can also talk about other subjects if pressed;).
Are you not going, but would like to? Gartner has given us a couple of free passes to extend to our beloved community. So, if you are interested shoot me an email at crow [at] intalio [dot] com. I am sure the tickets will go fast, so it’s on a first come first serve basis.
If so let me know. I would love to meet you there.
For those of you not familiar with the event:
Business Process Management Congress 2008
Learn How To Model, Manage, Monitor, And Optimise Your Business Processes
September 1 - 5, 2008 · Gallagher Estate, Johannesburg, South Africa
The event looks really solid, with something like 50 speakers, and many of them really worth listening to. But come and see my presentation anyway:). I will be discussing real projects of real customers using our BPM solution, Intalio|BPP, as their core platform. I will also bring out some of the reasons why open source was important for their adoption of our software suite.
A little while back Informatica announced that they were embedding Intalio into PowerCenter, their data quality and integration platform. The topic of BPM and SOA and data quality and integration has beed widely discussed, not only at our user conference, but by Ash Parikh of Informatica on his blog, also here, here, and here, not to mention the vendors trying to cobble together solutions.
Especially in BPM projects content is king. We all know bad data in = bad data out. But if you turbo charge the process with BPM you get bad data out squared. Other solutions tend to minimize the data integration complexity or rely on application integration to handle the data. Enterprise companies require flexibility in their data integration projects. With a mixture of batch and real-time data migration applications can easily get out of synch. Duplication of data at the minimum can cause a significant drop in productivity. At the more problematic end of the spectrum it can cause, for example, billing issues that may cost the company (previously) loyal customers.
What data problems do you have? I would be interested in hearing your stories about how bad data has created headaches for your company.
