Intalio|Labs

Intalio|Labs is where innovation happens at Intalio. Our engineers work together with customers and partners on new ideas and technologies. Some projects eventually make their way into our open source projects and commercial products, other just make us smarter.

Projects developed by Intalio|Labs are originated by Intalio employees, or by customers and partners. Intalio provides expertise and software engineering resources, while customers and partners provide product requirements. In some cases, funding is also provided by customers and partners in order to guarantee the completion of a project within a certain timeframe, and according to an agreed-upon Statement of Work. Please feel free to contact labs@intalio.com for more information on this program, or to make suggestions for additional projects. The following projects are currently under review or active development:

Audio & Video Streaming

Many of our customers use Intalio|DMS to store and multimedia files and have expressed interest in adding audio and video streaming capabilities to the Document Management System. This project (codename Lithium) consists in evaluating the possibility of integrating Apple's open source Darwin Streaming Server, which supports the QuickTime and MPEG-4 file formats.

Business Intelligence Application

Intalio|Cloud currently provides a powerful Report Editor for creating reports and dashboards, albeit with limited drill-down features. This projects consists in developing a complete Business Intelligence Application, with advanced data analytics capabilities supported by an embedded OLAP server. This application will be based on the Mondrian OLAP server (Learn More).

Cassandra Support

Intalio|Cloud currently provides an Elastic Database service based on a relational database management system (RDBMS). While offering an excellent level of scalability for up to a few dozen servers, perfect horizontal elasticity can only be achieved with next-generation database engines that provide a fully distributed design and a ColumnFamily-based data model. Nevertheless, such database engines do not currently provide support for SQL. This project consists in investigating the need for and suitability of a NoSQL engine, and the possibility of adding partial support for SQL to an existing columnar database engine. This project is currently focused on the Apache Cassandra engine (Learn More).

Cloudbursting Infrastructure

While applications deployed on Intalio|Elastic Compute can be manually migrated to public clouds such as Amazon EC2, some customers have expressed the need for more dynamic cloudbursting. This project consists in implementing an infrastructure allowing applications to be dynamically migrated between heterogenous hypervisors and between public and private clouds, with minimal interruption of service.

Code Container

Custom code can be added to existing Intalio|SaaS applications such as Intalio|BPM and Intalio|CRM by using the Java programming language. While perfectly suitable for a broad range of requirements, support for additional languages would open Intalio's ecosystem to other communities of developers, while helping companies leverage the investments made in training their employees. This project consists in adding support for other languages for which a compiler or interpreter can be deployed on top of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), such as Groovy, PHP with Quercus, Python with Jython, Ruby with JRuby, and Scala.

Elastic Storage for Large Files

While Intalio|Elastic Storage does not limit the size of the files it can handle, Amazon S3 imposes a 5GB limit. Future versions of Intalio|Elastic Storage might have such a limitation as well, due to the fact that files would actually be stored into MySQL, instead of being stored directly on the filesystem. This project consists in evaluating alternative options that would remove this limitation.

Hypervisor Agnostic Elastic Storage Infrastructure

The current version of Intalio|Elastic Storage is dependent on the VMware vSpahere hypervisor. This project consists in developing a new infrastructure for Elastic Storage that will support any hypervisor to be supported by Intalio|Elastic Compute. This project is based on the open source Gluster cluster file-system (Gluster).

Intalio|Cloud for iPad

Intalio|Cloud is optimized for mobile computing, and Apple's iPad has to be one of the best mobile devices ever created, so it was only a matter of time until the former was to made run on the later. This project consists in developing a Universal Application for iPad, iPod, and iPod Touch that gives access to all objects managed by Intalio|Cloud (Create, Read, Update, Delete), and includes Intalio's powerful search engine.

JVM Virtualization

With the release of the Azul Virtual Machine as a standalone software product (Learn More), a new level of virtualization is now available, providing an alternative to Application Server Virtualization that offers better memory management. This project consists in evaluating the performance of the Azul Virtual Machine, and its suitability for lightweight multi-tenancy.

Multiple Hypervisor Support

While Intalio|Cloud's Small Business Edition supports multiple hypervisors, the Enterprise Edition and Service Provider Edition are currently limited to VMware vSphere. This project consists in adding support for Hyper-V, KVM, and Xen. Other hypervisors such as Parallels and VirtualBox are being considered as well.

Public Clouds Support

Currently, Intalio|Cloud can be deployed on Amazon EC2, and support for Microsoft Azure is under development. This project consists in investigating how additional Public Clouds such as Rackspace, Savvis, and Terremark could be supported as well.

SOA Platform

Currently, Intalio|Mashup Studio is deployed on top of a lightweight Enterprise Service Bus made of Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Camel. This project consists in integrating a complete Service Oriented Architecture, including a high-performance transport layer and a SOA governance application.

Social Portal

Intalio|Social Portal is currently under development at Intalio|Labs and a first release will be part of Intalio|Cloud Winter '10.

Visualforce to X# Translator

More and more Salesforce.com customers are considering switching over to Intalio|CRM in order to get more control over their production environment, solve some scalability issues experienced when developing complex applications, and address compliance requirements, especially in the financial services industry and public sector. Since Intalio|CRM has an object model similar to the one of Salesforce.com's, the migration of existing business objects (standard and custom) and associated data can be fully automated. The conversion of APEX code to Java code has to be done manually, since APEX is a legacy and proprietary language that will ultimately be replaced by Java on the Salesforce.com platform. This leaves the migration of VisualForce code, for which Intalio|Cloud provides an equivalent language called X#. While VisualForce and X# share the same XML syntax and MVC pattern, they are not strictly identical, therefore existing VisualForce code must be converted to X# by hand. This project consists in developing an automatic VisualForce to X# translator.

Web Office

Intalio|Web Office is currently under development at Intalio|Labs and a first release will be part of Intalio|Cloud Winter '10.

Please contact labs@intalio.com to suggest additional projects.