Services are the building blocks of SOA, and like building blocks of a house or a building, the quality will define the value of the finished product. In this case, the SOA itself. Thus, spending...

Today’s BPM Suites are delivering on customers’ capability wish lists, but vendors are having a hard time getting buyers to put their money where their mouth is. Caught in limbo between IT infrastructure and an enterprise application, BPMS doesn’t fit traditional payback models of either IT or line of business investment, so it faces a heightened “prove-it” mentality from corporate buyers. But your CFO won’t go for the upfront six-figure outlay you need to demonstrate the payback is real. It’s a classic Catch-22.

OK, suppose the BPMS software were free. Free, as in costs nothing. Zero. Nada. Now are you willing to greenlight that BPMS project? That’s what Intalio aims to find out.

Although today it is just one of countless small pureplay BPMS vendors, Intalio was actually the originator of standards-based service-oriented BPM. Intalio invented BPML, the first process language based on service orchestration, then created BPMI.org with 200 member companies to endorse it as a industry standard, and built a complete BPMS based on it, all of which inspired Smith and Fingar’s widely read if controversial book, BPM: The Third Wave. But instead of creating instant financial success, all the innovation and hype succeeded mainly in galvanizing IBM and Microsoft to join forces and produce the competing BPEL standard, which even without a single commercial implementation was enough to carry the day. Eventually acknowledging defeat, Intalio quietly switched its own BPMS to BPEL last year.

Bloodied but undaunted, the company now promises to shake up the BPM landscape once again, this time by completely eliminating the license fee for the BPM suite. BPMS vendors who have been complaining lately about competitors’ rampant price-cutting now really have something to get upset about. How can Intalio afford to do this? By going open source. Open source means that the source code for the various engines and tools is available for free. It can be modified and extended by other developers and incorporated in their own offerings.

Intalio has now transformed itself into “The Open Source BPMS Company.” Step One was the acquisition of FiveSight Technologies, the company that brought to market the first open source implementation of the BPEL 2.0 specification. Embedded by major open source projects such as the ServiceMix Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and leading development tools like Sun's Java Studio Enterprise, the FiveSight PXE BPEL 2.0 engine – rebranded Intalio|BPMS – is effectively the most widely deployed BPEL product today. Intalio is planning to continue the development of the BPEL engine under the open source Common Public License, and release its BPMN process modeler and BPEL4People workflow component under similar open source licenses later in 2006. The Intalio|BPMS Open Source Edition includes these three components plus open source ESB, integration adapters, and rule engine. Its customers will be mainly independent software vendors, who will embed the engine and tools into their own end user offerings.

For end user organizations looking to implement BPMS, Intalio will also offer the Community Edition. Community Edition is not open source, but it is free. Based on the open source BPEL engine, workflow extensions, and BPMN modeler, Community Edition is a complete J2EE BPMS, including a full Eclipse-based BPMN process designer supporting data mapping and simulation, a rule engine, ESB, integration adapters, metadata repository, and a full BAM suite. The only “catch,” if you want to call it that, is that it runs on Geronimo, the Apache open source app server and the MySQL database. Unlike competitive free offerings like Oracle BPEL Manager, not only is the development environment free but so is the production environment.

The suite includes some third party components like BAM for which customers are now paying six-figure license fees using the traditional software business model. Urged on by Intalio, these partners are also drinking the free software Kool-Aid. So how will Intalio (and its partners) stay in business? Following the Linux model, by offering fee-based support, in the range of three to eight thousand dollars per CPU per year for most of the Community Edition. That should make the CFO smile.

OK, you’re saying, the price is right, but this is a mission-critical process. Our CIO doesn’t want it running on some hokey open source platform. For that, Intalio offers the Enterprise Edition, which allows the BPMS to run on any J2EE app server and DBMS. Enterprise Edition is not free, but by the time you need it you can prove the payback is real. It’s basically a license upgrade. The BPM solution doesn’t change. It’s not even a port; you just redeploy files from the Geronimo environment to WebSphere or BEA or your app server of choice.

If Intalio can pull this off without going broke, it will totally change the economics of BPM development. One large global system integrator, unwilling to spring for Visio licenses for its thousands of BPM practitioners, is adopting for the value of the BPMN designer alone! But remember, this is a complete BPMS – modeling and simulation, BPEL engine, human workflow, business rules, ESB, integration adapters, metadata repository, and BAM. And it’s free! The software is currently in beta, with general availability in Q1.

Bruce Silver

Bruce Silver (bruce@brsilver.com) is an independent industry analyst covering BPMS technology and the author of the 2006 BPMS Report series on bpminstitute.org. Additional reports and commentary can be found at www.brsilver.com.

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