Intalio, Leader in Open Source BPMS » Intalio JapanCon 2008: Introducing BPP

Intalio JapanCon 2008: Introducing BPP

By Jonathan Crow

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.

Other blog articles in this series:

October 5th, 2008