Intalio, Leader in Open Source BPMS

Business Technology Interview: Arnaud Blandin

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.

Meet Intalio In New York - Nov. 18

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.

Looking foward to seeing you there.

Bino Jos
Process Expert, Intalio.

Renaissance Time Square Hotel

Two Times Square, 714 Seventh Avenue

New York, NY 10036

Process Expert (Singapore)

Position

Job Title: Process Expert
Opening Date: Now
Location: Singapore

Job Description

This is a high-potential opportunity to help grow a global company that is revolutionizing the enterprise software industry. Intalio is the thought leader in the fast-growing Business Process Management System market, with over 20,000 registered users, a best-of-breed open source SOA/BPM stack, a marketing focus on lead generation and sales-driven culture. You’ll be working with the very latest cutting edge technologies in a company culture that encourages success through innovation coupled with hard work.

Job Responsibilities

Develop and deliver enablement services
Develop and maintain strong product line code level technical expertise
Achieve quarterly quota of subscriptions
Build and manage customer relationship
Assist customers in designing and delivering appropriate solutions
Promote customer advocacy by driving product improvements
Provide feedback to QA, Engineering and Product Management
Deliver reusable technical and sales & marketing documentation

Job Requirements

Fluent in English, Mandarin a plus
Outstanding customer services skills
Excellent written/verbal communication and phone skills
Ability to multi-task, prioritize, and manage time effectively
Ability to work in a fast paced and dynamic environment
Proven willingness to go the extra mile to get the job done
Strong analytical skills
Excellent software architecture skills
Experience and working knowledge in Java, J2EE, XML, XML Schema, XSLT
Good understanding of Business Process Management
Knowledge of BPMN and BPEL is a plus
Deep understanding of Web Services
Project management/problem management capabilities are a plus
Bachelor’s Degree from a 4-Year University
Minimum 2 years of experience in delivering integration services
Technical pre-sales experience is a plus
Travel up to 100% worldwide

Application

To apply for this position, please send an email to careers@intalio.com.

About Intalio

Intalio is the leading Open Source BPMS vendor. Intalio|BPMS empowers organizations of all sizes to design, deploy, and optimize the most complex business processes, on top of any application and middleware system, without having to write any code. Intalio|BPMS is the only Open Source BPMS to natively support the BPMN, BPEL and BPEL4People standards.

Come to See Us at ApacheCon in New Orleans

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!

Journal of Digital Asset Management Interviews Ismael Ghalimi

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.

Twittering

We now twitter our blog posts!

Please feel free to follow Intalio.

Director of Support

Position

Job Title: Director of Support
Opening Date: Now
Location: Palo Alto, CA

Job Description

Intalio is the leader in open source Business Process Management with a fast growing user community and customer base. You will be responsible for Intalio most strategic processes to enable a scaling and profitable support organization at a global level, with both off-shore and on-shore resources.

Job Responsibilities

Define, implement and continuously improve Intalio support processes
Manage team responsible for providing technical support 24×7 to over 500 customers in 45 countries through partnerships and internal resources to develop.
Establish and monitor key support performance indicators for all customer projects
Providing tools necessary for support processes to operate
Ensure scalability of the overall support organization to support Intalio exponential growth.
Build and manage customer relationship
Promote customer advocacy by driving product improvements/enhancements and providing feedback to QA, Engineering and Product Management regarding the quality and utility of Intalio’s solutions.

Job Requirements

Minimum 4 years experience in technical support management
Strong background in business process analysis and management
Knowledge of support products and technologies
Prior experience establishing a scaling support organization
Excellent written/verbal communication and phone skills
Excellent influencing and negotiation skills
Strong Project management/problem management capabilities.
Experience in open source company is a plus.
Experience in middleware is a plus.
Fluency in a foreign language is a plus.
Bachelor’s Degree from a 4-Year University in computer science, technology, engineering or related discipline.
Travel up to 50% worldwide

Application

To apply for this position, please send an email to careers@intalio.com.

About Intalio

Intalio presentation at the Open Source Series Workshop 2008

Adeel Javeed presented Intalio at the Open Source Series Workshop 2008.

He made the slides available on Slideshare. Don’t hesitate to give some feedback!

Intalio JapanCon 2008: Intalio Server Overview

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.

Other blog articles in this series:

Intalio JapanCon 2008: Liferay Portal

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.

Other blog articles in this series: