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Intalio Developer Edition
2008-10-03 06:03:00
Earlier this week, I explained why we care about developers, and mentioned that our engineering team was working on a new product called Intalio Developer Edition . I cannot tell you when it will be released (we announce release dates only for D3-funded projects), but it can't be too far away, for even our engineers are starting to write about it publicly, and are even showing screenshots. Here comes Matthieu Riou (of Apache ODE fame), on the newly-released Intalio Developer's Corner blog. On his post, Matthieu explains why we need processes, why writing BPEL by hand is not such a great idea, and why SimPEL is a much better one. He also writes about the Singleshot task manager interface, which was first introduced publicly by Intalio's CTO (Assaf Arkin of Labnotes fame) during the first Intalio User Conference [presentation]. It is built in Ruby on Rails, uses RSS for task notification, ICAL for event scheduling, and is fully integrated with Apache ODE. Honestly, it's a thing of ...

Don't Build Your Own BPMS
2008-10-02 06:03:00
As the BPMS is turning into the next RDBMS for building enterprise apps (Cf. recent post), many enterprise application vendors are looking at BPM to renovate their underlying platform. While they could build their own, now that industry standards have been set (BPMN + BPEL), licensing an existing one makes a lot more sense. Let's take a look at how three industry leaders (INFORMATICA, Telcordia, and Coghead) are using Intalio do deliver best-in-class applications to their customers. INFORMATICA is a leading provider of enterprise data integration software. As integration scenarios developed by their customers were becoming more and more complex, they wanted to develop the first process-driven data integration platform, and licensed the core Intalio platform (BPMN Designer, BPEL Server, BPEL4People Workflow Framework) back in December 2007. Intalio was not on their radar initially, and came in at the very last minute through an introduction made to their CEO by no other than Marc Be...
More About: Build

Intalio Quarterly Results
2008-10-01 18:45:00
The past quarter for Intalio is now closed, and we just compiled our preliminary results. For the third quarter in a row, we exceeded our bookings targets, and increased our year-over-year quarterly bookings by more than 150%. In the past three months, we closed 116 transactions. That?s 1.26 transactions every day of the week, week-ends included. Following is a list of transactions that were closed this quarter, and for which we?re not under NDA. Accenture Adaption Technologies Akciju komercbanka Baltikums ARBICHE Solutions Banco de Venezuela Barris Lotterer Management Consulting, Inc. Bergen Kommune Bitahead Buserdi Capgemini Catena Technologies Pte. Ltd. Client-Line CommITment AS Compliancy Software Comunità Montana Grand Paradis Corratech CSC D8 Latvia Deutsche Bank E-Chain Management EDS eNCoral Digital Solutions Endocrine Medical Home Ernst & Young Eurobank Cards SA Fermat Fifth Judicial District General Electric Company Hastings Law Firm HRDS Innovation Support ICTUS Co. Ltd...
More About: Results

Who Is Making Money with BPM 2.0
2008-10-01 06:03:00
You know that a market segment for enterprise software is about to get really big when system integrators start developing dedicated practices for it, and BPM 2.0 is no exception to the rule. Problem is, discussions covering the BPM space are largely dominated by reconverted BPR consultants who don't care much about system integration, while system integrators are usually careful not to talk too much about what they are doing for their clients. As a result, they go largely unnoticed. So let's shed some light about what they are doing with Intalio. First, some metrics about training: over the past two years, 171 system integrators sent at least one consultant to an Intalio training session?and paid for it. On average, they actually sent two, and the largest team was 16 strong. Before the end of the year, a team of 30 will have been trained?at Satyam?and similar groups will be found at firms like Capgemini and CSC. If you cannot tell whether 171 is a big number, just remember that a...
More About: Money

Developers! Developers! Developers!
2008-09-30 06:03:00
Any platform vendor knows that success (or failure) is a direct consequence of how well (or poorly) the platform is adopted by developers, which is the reason why Steve Ballmer keeps making appeals to them. Depending on who you talk to, BPM (or the BPMS) is either a business application, or a development platform. If it is to be the former, it really does not work, for no BPMS I know of can be used by business users alone. And if it is to be the later, BPM vendors ? Intalio being first among them ? failed miserably in their understanding of what developers need. This painful reality dawned on me when one of our senior developers (Matthieu Riou, of Apache ODE famed) made the case for a new product offering that would be directly targeted at developers. Let's take a closer look at why such a product is needed, and how we are putting it together. First, why did we (BPM vendors) fail? Two main reasons. One, the top-down BPM vendors (the ones selling BPM applications) worked hard to put...
More About: Developers

BPM 2.0 and Complex Event Processing
2008-09-29 19:26:00
Answering to my recent post on Intalio 2.0, Chris Sotudeh wondered if we saw Complex Event Processing (CEP) being part of Intalio 2.0 (the company) or Intalio 6.0 (the product). Chris must be reading my mind, because CEP is very much on our roadmap, even though we said very little about it so far. Here are some more details. Here is how Wikipedia defines Complex Event Processing: Complex Event Processing, or CEP, is primarily an event processing concept that deals with the task of processing multiple events from a so called event cloud with the goal of identifying the meaningful events within the event cloud. CEP employs techniques such as detection of complex patterns of many events, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events such as causality, membership, and timing, and event-driven processes. There are may ways one can build a CEP platform, and rather than trying to compare them against each other, I would like to outline how a BPM 2.0...

Why BPEL
2008-09-28 11:45:00
Following my recent post on BPM 2.0, Sandy Kemsley, one of the few independent analysts covering the BPM space, was quick to agree with our updated definition of BPM 2.0, at the exception of one point (out of sixteen): support for BPEL. The question of BPEL vs. XPDL, (or BPEL vs. nothing) has been one of the most debated topics in the decade-long history of BPM. Here is why BPEL matters. First, let me make something clear, once and for all: nobody should ever try to write BPEL code by hand, unless they really have to. As far as I'm concerned, the ones that really have to are employed by BPM vendors whose products support BPEL. BPEL is an extremely powerful yet very complex language, and I don't think there are more than a few hundred people around the world who can write decent BPEL code by hand. BPEL is a precise yet verbose language that was conceived to be produced automatically by code generators, not written by hand. In other words, BPEL is for computers, not human beings, at...

BPM 2.0: Méfiez vous des imitations
2008-09-26 20:18:00
Back in February 2006, I wrote a first post on BPM 2.0. It was an attempt at defining what was wrong with the way BPM products were packaged and marketed, and it served as a guidewire for many subsequent posts. The term had originally been coined by my friend Bruce Silver, but Intalio (to be called The BPM 2.0 Company soon) gave it its substance. Since then, it has been referenced by IBM in a fairly decent fashion, by former Gatner analyst turned Global 360 evangelist turned Gartner analyst again Jim Sinur in a rather poor manner, and it's time for Intalio to take the leadership position again. Let's see how we would define BPM 2.0 today. First, let's see what is still relevant, was is not, and what needs clarification: BPM 2.0 circa 2006 BPM 2.0 Revisited Used by Process Analysts Still relevant Starting with a Complete BPMS Still relevant One Single Tool in Eclipse Irrelevant Loved by ABAP, PHP and VB Folks Needs clarification BPEL Still rele...

Advice to My Competitors
2008-09-26 19:02:00
Since we're now officially in a recession, it's time for everyone to revisit their plans. Some will gain, but most will lose, and some to be really affected by the downturn are enterprise software vendors selling expensive perpetual licenses for their products. The problem will get even worse for those selling expensive BPM software that can only be deployed by expensive consultants on the vendors' payrolls. To those, I'd like to offer some advice, and maybe some help. Most of Intalio's self-described competitors in the BPM space are pure plays selling complete solutions to business buyers. Essentially, they go to the business side of the house, and ask which processes are broken. They pick a fairly simple one, quickly build a Proof of Concept (never showing all the code that goes behind the little boxes), and sell a mix of products and services that will hopefully fix the process, these services being almost always delivered by the vendor's consultants. We do none of that at ...
More About: Advice , Competitors

Oracle Gets It
2008-09-26 17:19:00
My friend Bruce Silver has a nice post describing Oracle 's BPM roadmap. From support for BPMN 2.0 and BPEL 2.0, to integration with a Process Portal and a Business Rules Engine, everything seems to be right on this picture, at the exception of one little detail: it won't be available before a year. This is quite interesting, for Intalio's stack is similar in most respects, but is available today, for free. So let's review the stack, and see how we compare: BPMN 2.0: Intalio|Designer supports it, in Eclipse (vs. JDeveloper). BPEL: Intalio|Server supports BPEL 2.0, 1.1, and 1.0. BPEL4People Intalio|Server supports it, with support for XForms. Business Rules: Intalio|BRE is now available, with graphical editor in Eclipse. SCA: Intalio|Server supports it, alongside Axis 2, Mule, and ServiceMix (JBI). Application Server: Intalio|Server runs on 7 of them (not just WebLogic). Application Grid: Intalio|Server runs on Amazon EC2, VMware, and WVS. Distributed Cache: Intalio|Server suppo...

Intalio 2.0
2008-09-26 14:38:00
Nine years ago, I came to the U.S. to create Intalio and build what I called at the time a transactional workflow system. I was fresh out of school (and not yet graduated), had no money, no connections with investors, and no experience with enterprise software whatsoever. I and two other co-founders arrived in the Bay Area in July 1999, raised our seed round in August, and started building our product with a junior engineering team. Little did I know that it would take us almost a decade to turn the vision into reality. Today, we closed our last round of financing, successfully completing a company re-start that was initiated almost two years ago. Now is time to take this gem of a company to the next level, and I'd love to take you along for the ride. The vision for Intalio was to build a next-generation platform that would support the development of enterprise applications in a process oriented way. Essentially, doing for processes what the Relational Database Management System (R...

Exchanging Contact Information
2008-09-11 15:28:00
One of the many processes we would like to improve for next year's Office 2.0 Conference is the exchange of contact information among participants. We're trying to make it paper-less, without requiring any custom software to be installed on the mobile devices used by attendees. After looking at many different options, we believe that 2D code scanning is the best one. Here is the scenario: A 2D barcode (DataMatrix Code, EZcode, QR Code, or similar) is printed on all attendee badges. Attendee A and Attendee B are both registered on the office20.com community website. Their respective profiles contains all the information usually found in a vcard. Attendee A wants to get Attendee B's contact information. Attendee A takes a picture of Attendee B's badge with her camera phone, and sends it as an email attachment to id@office20.com. A reply email is automatically sent back to Attendee A with Attendee B's vcard. Attendee A can also log on to the office20.com community site and do...
More About: Information , Contact

Taking Office 2.0 to the Next Level
2008-09-08 15:50:00
The Office 2.0 Conference 2008 is over now, and we've received a lot of feedback. Overall, the conference was a great success, and its content has significantly improved from last year. Yet many attendees pointed out that putting the show together in less than two months is making it very difficult for a lot of people to participate, either as attendees or sponsors. As a result, we've decided to give ourselves a full year to organize the 2009 edition. The location remains the same, dates are set to September 21-23, 2009 (Monday through Wednesday), registration is open ($1,495 until December 31st, 2008), and we will keep our tradition of giving away a mobile device to every paying attendee. Also, we have made some changes to our sponsorship packages in order to simplify things, and make sure that early-stage companies get proper representation. Next year's theme is "The Global Office" and our goal is to gather one representative from as many Global 500 firms, national governm...
More About: Taking

Office 2.0 Conference 2009
2008-09-05 13:30:00
While the 2008 edition of the Office 2.0 Conference is still going on, we're already starting to plan for the next one. For the first three editions, we've done everything in less than 2 months, as a way to prove that Office 2.0 tools and the GTD can significantly increase productivity. Today, I think we made our point, and moving forward, we'd like to take the event to the next level, especially with respect to the quality of the online infrastructure we're building to support it. As a result, we decided to give ourselves a full year to organize the 2009 edition. At present time, we're looking at Monday through Wednesday, September 20-23, 2009. Please let us know if you can think of any other event taking place at the same time, or close to it.

Office 2.0 Backchannel
2008-09-04 11:58:00
If you want to ask questions during keynotes and panels, please add them on this Google spreadsheet (office20.com account required).
More About: Office

Welcome Veodia
2008-09-03 21:58:00
Hidden Text  This stuff really works! I love it... Make sure to try it. We want at least one video per participant. See you online!

Agenda Heat Map
2008-09-03 20:09:00
Now that all the pieces of the puzzle are starting to connect with each other, some pretty cool mashups can be built. Here is one courtesy of Eric Ly from Presdo, based on an idea originally suggested by one of our friends at Google: an Agenda Heat Map, showing the popularity of sessions based on actual user scheduling. As attendees to the Office 2.0 Conference are adding sessions to their Google Calendar, Presdo is fetching the data (anonymously), and feeding it to a Google Spreadsheet, which cells' colors are based on the number of attendees scheduled to attend any particular session. It's interesting to see that out of 400 attendees who received an account on Google Apps on Monday, more than 50 were already using it by Tuesday. We wil publish a revised heat map later tonight. In the meantime, sessions having less than 10 scheduled attendees should really start pimping themselves through blog posts on the conference's website...

Setting up the HP 2133 Mini-Note
2008-09-03 19:13:00
It looks like some attendees are finding it difficult to setup their HP 2133 Mini -Note . Quite frankly, I'm not surprised. The device is running Linux, and Linux on the desktop is not really ready for prime time. Also, its default configuration is not fully optimized. The screen resolution is set too low for example. It should be WXGA, at 1280 x 800. If you want help getting your device up and running and connected to the amazing Wi-Fi network deployed for the conference by Swisscom and Covad, join us in the Impressionist at 5PM tonight (Wednesday). I'll give you step by step instructions, unless an expert wants to step up. In which case, I'll continue answering emails and trying to get the agenda heat map uploaded to the site. 2133 expert, anyone?

Questions for David Allen
2008-09-03 14:13:00
As I am preparing for tomorrow's chat with David Allen , I am finding it difficult to prioritize all the questions I would like to ask him. How did he come up with the GTD? What kind of tools is he using? Could he move to a pure Office 2.0 setup? But I'm sure you have many questions for him as well, so please ask them as comments to this post. And make sure to add this session to your calendar ? it's a plenary one, so you won't miss anything.
More About: Questions

Presdo is Magic
2008-09-02 21:19:00
I met Eric Ly, founder of Presdo, two and a half years ago. At the time, he was Director of Engineering at LinkedIn. Over lunch, I told him where I'd like the LinkedIn platform to go. He listened, agreed with the direction, but remained noncommittal. Six months later, I met him again, this time for breakfast. He had left LinkedIn, and was working on a new idea, losely related to meeting scheduling. I asked him to be on the short list of people he would show his first prototype to. Five months ago, we met for breakfast again, and he gave me a first demo. I was the first to blog about it, which almost cost him an article on TechCrunch (I'm really glad he still got one). The application was great, and was only missing a direct link to Google Calendar. Today, this has been fixed. Over the past week or so, Eric and his team worked around the clock to develop the scheduling system we are using to schedule demos and meetings during the Office 2.0 Conference. This thing is amazing. A...
More About: Magic

Conference Calendar
2008-09-01 17:24:00
The calendar for the Office 2.0 Conference is now online. All sessions are recorded there, with links to their respective pages. If you're attending the conference, please add all the sessions you're planning to attend (including plenary sessions) to your own calendar in your office20.com Google Apps account. To do so, just click on the session you want to add, and click on the "copy to my calendar" link. If we manage to find some time for it, we will add heat maps showing the most popular sessions ahead of time.
More About: Calendar

Google Apps Accounts
2008-08-31 20:31:00
Close to 400 Google Apps accounts on the office20.com domain name have now been created and shared with their owners. To do so, we synchronized our RegOnline attendee database with our Salesforce.com instance, exported an attendee list from Salesforce.com into a .csv file, imported the file in Google Spreadsheet, randomly generated temporary passwords using the RANDBETWEEN() function, exported the updated attendee list into another .csv file, and created the accounts in Google Apps using the bulk upload function (very handy). Once all the accounts had been created, we created security tokens for each and every one of them to be used by the Presdo scheduling application. The final step was to send an email to every attendee with their login and password. To do so, we enlisted the help of Raju Vegesna and his team at Zoho, and built a little application with Zoho Creator. It worked, and tonight Google Apps can claim a few more happy users. Many thanks to all involved ? this part ...

Extreme Productivity Seminar
2008-08-31 18:01:00
The Extreme Productivity Seminar scheduled to take place on Friday, August 26 has been moved to Saturday, September 6 in order to allow participants to the Office 2.0 Conference to attend. If you want to learn how to implement an optimized version of David Allen's Getting Things Done process using Office 2.0 tools, please register now. "Your seminar was fantastic!"?Oliver Starr "The Extreme Productivity Seminar really helped me improve my existing GTD setup. Much recommended to get more done in less time."?Sebastien Stadil "Having a good tracking system for opportunities, portfolio companies, and managing time in general is critical for running a venture firm well. I looked at and experimented with just about everything. Ismael's approach to Extreme Productivity is the only system I've seen that combines the ease of use and power that I was looking for. Highly recommended and very thought-provoking."?Mike Maples "Ismael is an inspiration. The fact that he is a...

Google Keynote
2008-08-29 17:03:00
We just got permission to announce that the surprise keynote will be delivered by someone from Google .
More About: Keynote

Looking for Volunteers
2008-08-28 15:07:00
We're currently in the process of migrating the Office 2.0 Database to Clearspace (front-end) and Zoho Creator (back-end). While most of the content can be automatically migrated, we might have to do some manual data entry to make it right. If you have some free time available in the coming days and are not afraid of doing some really boring work, please send an email at ismael at monolab dot com. Thanks!
More About: Volunteers

More Mashups
2008-08-27 17:17:00
Yesterday, Raju Vegesna (of Zoho fame) asked me whether we'd consider using Zoho Share for sharing all the presentations that will be given during the conference. My answer was: "sure, we'd love to, but only if you support single sign-on with Google Apps." Quite frankly, I was expecting his answer to be either "sorry, we can't do that," or "sure, we'll build it for you." But to my surprise, such an integration is already implemented, as illustrated on this post. That's Zoho magic for you. And if you wonder why a company like Zoho would develop single sign-on with applications developed by their primary competitor, stop wondering: these guys are different, and understand karma better than anyone else. So here we are: we invite all speakers to upload their presentations on Zoho Share once they receive their complimentary office20.com Google Apps account, to be sent later today or tomorrow. I'm loving it... Every bit of it...
More About: Mashups

More Sponsors
2008-08-27 12:58:00
Running fast and furious, we signed 8 new sponsors in the past 24 hours: Atlassian, Email Center Pro, Mindjet, MindTouch, NewsGator, and Storm Ventures. We still have a few pods available, as well as slots for the Launchpad. We also have sponsorship opportunities for several functions (breakfasts and lunches), and a custom deal for VC firms interested in sending multiple partners with a discounted pass that does not include the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC (most VCs have an iPhone already anyway). Please contact us at ismael at monolab dot com for more information. But hurry up, for time is running out quickly.
More About: Sponsors

Animoto Movies
2008-08-27 12:28:00
Once again, Animoto blessed us with a couple of their trademark movies, one for our beloved sponsors, and one of the Launchpad companies. Many thanks to Brad and Rebecca for their help. We look forward to meeting you at the conference.
More About: Movies

Google Partnership
2008-08-25 20:42:00
Our goal this year is to provide a fantastic online experience to all our attendees, for both the ones who can make it to San Francisco, and the ones who can't. One part of the challenge is to provide a community website that can be used before, during, and after the conference, for attendees to network and get the most out of their participation. In that respect, Jive Software's Clearspace is doing wonders, with already a dozen active blogs hosted on the site. Another part is to provide the right collaboration tools for attendees to schedule meetings and interact in real time. This is especially important now that we decided to organize the Office 2.0 Launchpad, and must provide the appropriate demo scheduling system for it. On that front, I've got some good news (for a change). Today, Google gave us 1,000 accounts for Google Apps, hosted on the office20.com domain name. What this means is that all our physical attendees ? plus several hundred online attendees ? will get a ...

Blogging Day
2008-08-25 01:20:00
Tomorrow, Monday, August 25, is the day picked by many bloggers to write about the conference. If you have a blog, please join them and write about the event, by linking to this post. Thank you!
More About: Blogging