Turns out there is a class at the Helsinki University of Technology focusing on Enterprise integration technologies and writing scientific reports based on research in this area. Part of the class is devoted to Business Process integration, modeling, and management.

We were pleased to see that a few students wrote fairly detailed analysis of Intalio. One paper from Pekka Helkiö, Antti Seppälä, and Ossi Syd discussed the importance of standards, specifically BPMN and BPEL, and the degree to which Intalio complied with these standards. For BPMN they noted that there were some notations missing but the end effect was negligible. For BPEL they found "no evidence of non-conformance to [the] WS-BPEL 2.0 standard." Looking at the report from an objective standpoint it was a great read. From a vendor standpoint I would love to have seen some comparison.

Speaking of comparisons, the other report was done by Pin Nie, Riku Seppälä, and Måns Hafrén in cooperation with the end client Logica. This paper picked up on the previous research noting that the authors themselves would have liked to see comparisons as well. So, these students compared Intalio|Community Edition with JBoss jBPM. In a section on the different methodologies of the two companies, the authors discussed the philosophy here at Intalio of getting IT and business people on the same tool, as opposed to catering only to developers. There is a lot of detailed information in this paper as well. Intalio was given high marks for the ability of our process engine to support compensating transactions and exception handlers. In the area of process modeling, Intalio|Designer gained prominence for our "superior visualization."