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Utility Based Pricing for Private Cloud Computing
2009-05-20 21:49:00 We just published our utility-based pricing for private cloud computing. More About: Computing , Private , Utility , Cloud , Cloud Computing
Rocking and Rolling
2009-05-19 22:07:00 We did it! Today, Intalio successfully released Intalio|BPM Business Edition, Intalio|CRM, Intalio|Cloud, and the Intalio|Cloud Appliance, plus a working version of the ultra-cool Process Table built for the Dogfood Project, powered by a preview release of the brand-new Intalio|BPM Developer Edition and fully integrated with Intalio|CRM. Registrations for Intalio|BPM and Intalio|CRM On-Demand are now open, and everything seems to be working flawlessly. Of course, we're still in Beta for both products, so bugs are to be expected, but at least we're live. We also announced two acquisitions: ProcessSquare in Germany (we never formally announced it until now) and CodeGlide in Argentina. A short version of our big story is available on this press release, and the full story is on the updated Intalio website. Rock on! More About: Rolling
Mad Rush
2009-05-18 13:39:00 Tomorrow, Intalio will release four new products, two of which are available on-demand, and one is made of atoms rather than bits. We will also announce the closing of another acquisition that is taking the company to a whole new level. As a result, we had to make significant changes to our website, move to a much larger data-center, implement native multi-tenancy in many parts of our product stack, integrate our online applications with our marketing automation, salesforce automation, billing, and accounting systems, all while putting the final touch on Intalio|BPM 6.0. In other words, we've been pretty busy. If you want to know more about what's going on at Intalio, check our website tomorrow (Tuesday) at 10am PDT, or join us for the launch party. More About: Rush
Datacenter
2009-05-06 20:31:00 While Facebook is moving out of Palo Alto downtown, Intalio|Cloud is moving into the same datacenter used by Facebook. We just received our first blade servers from HP this morning, and are working around the clock for the May 19 launch. If you want to know what this is all about, join us for the launch party.
MacBook Pro 17″
2009-04-12 01:07:00 The new MacBook Pro 17? is awesome! More About: Macbook , Macbook Pro
Weather Forecast
2009-04-12 01:04:00 On May 19, 2009, Intalio will change the forecast on cloud computing. Meet us at the Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley at 10AM PST. Please RSVP. More About: Weather , Weather forecast , Forecast
New Additions to the Families
2009-04-01 15:30:00 Intalio is days away from closing an acquisition that will be quite a game changer. While we were working on this deal, the quarter shaped up pretty well from a bookings standpoint, and we decided to raise our target by 15% two months into it. Today, I am pleased to report that we not only made our original target, but we also exceeded our revised target by another 3%. Not bad in such challenging economic times? In the meantime, another family got a new addition yesterday: Tao Aidan Chang Ghalimi made his way out to the world, just in time to close this quarter in style. Exciting times? More About: Families
March Haiku
2009-03-10 10:44:00 Funds are being raised Acquisitions are being closed Bright, chilly morning More About: Haiku , March
Stoicism Redux
2009-02-18 23:24:00 Warning: what follows contains materials of philosophical nature that might offend religious readers. Such is not my intention, but reader care is advised. Also, the reason why such an article was published on a blog usually covering enterprise software and personal productivity is that it relates to a book that might be of interest to some readers of David Allen?s Getting Things Done, which itself was covered repeatedly on these pages. Subsequent writings on the subject will take place at ghalimi.name, which is a more appropriate venue for such topics. Once in a while, one comes across an idea so profound that it has the power to change one?s life. So was the case for me yesterday on my way to Columbus, OH. Feeling like Christopher Columbus (re)discovering the Americas, I re-discovered the ancient Stoic philosophy through the reading of William B Irvine?s A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, thanks to a program I recently listened to on KPFA. I had never read th...
Introducing the Business Operating Platform
2009-02-16 21:09:00 When I started Intalio ten years ago, I wanted to build a Transactional Workflow System. Intalio's CTO Assaf Arkin did not like the term ?workflow,? which he felt carried too much legacy, hence we re-branded our product a Business Process Management System (BPMS). That was back in June 2000. Since then, the term BPM has been largely over-exposed, and failed to describe the completeness of our vision. Later on, Gartner came up with the concept of a Business Process Platform , and we adopted it, although quite reluctantly. More recently, Cordys started talking about a Business Operations Platform, and this terminology really resonated with me. To a large extent, what we're building is akin to a Business Operating System, but this term has been used to describe many different things (Cf. Wikipedia), and the word ?System? fails to describe a platform that could be used across organizations' boundaries (for what used to be called B2B). Therefore, we shall call our product a Business Op...
Data Meet Process
2009-02-13 18:00:00 Intalio is currently experiencing very rapid growth in emerging markets, especially in Latin America. Yesterday, our Spanish-speaking webinar attracted 79 participants, the highest turnout to date. In this particular market, we're facing an interesting competitor: Aura Portal. We come across them more and more often in competitive situations, and I've been trying to understand why so many companies in Latin America were attracted to their proprietary product, which is a blend of BPM, ECM, Portal, and? CRM. After some more noodling, I think I finally came up with the answer: by integrating CRM into the mix, Aura Portal is blending Process and Data , which is the secret for a perfect recipe. It's not the first time I write about this, but I'm now ready to act upon it. Whether analyst firms like it or not, BPM is not a business application, it's a business platform, and as such, it must support the development of enterprise applications in a process oriented way. For most new appli... More About: Meet
Apache ODE is Reaching Critical Mass
2009-02-13 15:01:00 The Apache ODE project lead by Intalio is reaching critical mass, more recently with its integration by WSO2. While many more vendors are considering using Apache ODE for adding BPEL support to their products, others do not seem too happy about this momentum, among them Alex Neihaus from Active Endpoints, who is claiming that WSO2's Carbon BPM isn't a product. I'm not a big fan of vendor bashing, and I certainly do not want to take any part in this silly fight, but I'm happy to answer Alex's list of 10 reasons that make Apache ODE (or WSO2 Business Process Server, same codebase) not a BPM product. If you want BPM based on the best BPEL engine around (ODE), Intalio has it in store, and we're open for business? 10. No worklist support Intalio's Tempo project does that, and it's available under the Eclipse Public License. It's also part of Intalio|Server, and it now includes Apache Jackrabitt (using Apache Sling) for document management. And if you want something more lightwei... More About: Mass , Critical
Intalio Developer Edition Coming Soon
2009-02-13 13:27:00 Sometime this quarter, Intalio will release two brand new editions for our open source Business Process Platform, the Business Edition and the Developer Edition. The former is the result of our acquisition of Process Square (Germany), while the later originated from an idea proposed by Matthieu Riou, one of the lead developers for Apache ODE, a project lead by Intalio. Here are more details about it. Intalio|BPP Developer Edition turns the BPM picture upside down. Instead of adopting a process-centric view of the world, it promotes a code-centric approach, and uses the BPEL engine as a mere utility for executing long-running transactions, which can be invoked from any piece of code, written in virtually any language. Much like a relational database can be used from any programming language through a database driver to store and retrieve information, the process engine can be used from any programming language through a process driver to orchestrate services and assign workflow tasks...
More on the Task Delegation Process
2009-02-12 21:05:00 Yesterday, I introduced the task delegation process as one of the process patterns I found particularly interesting. It turns out that I am not the only one, and a Dogfood team has been formed around it, with Robert (Vice President of Business Development) and Madhav (Sales Engineer). For them to be successful, they'll need some more detailed requirements, which I am happy to provide today. The scenario is pretty simple: a task is assigned by one user (Task Owner) to one or more users (Task Delegates). When the task is assigned by the Owner, each Delegate receives notification about it, and is presented with two options, Completed or Deny. The task is considered completed once all Delegates have either completed or denied it. When more than one Delegates are presented with the task, the participation of every Delegates is expected, which means that the work supposed to be performed by a Delegate who would deny the task will have to be performed by someone else. Should a task be den... More About: Process
BuzzGain
2009-02-11 19:40:00 One of the goals of our Dogfood Project is to automate our Public Relations process. In a PR 1.0 world, press releases would be sent to a handful of analysts and journalists from a Friends & Family list, and pushed on some wire service like PR Newswire. In today's PR 2.0 world, this approach simply does not scale anymore, and we need something quite a bit more powerful. Here comes BuzzGain. BuzzGain was launched by my friend Mukund Mohan, and does an amazing job at identifying influential voices on the web (from a database of 150 million entries), automatically learning about the topics they cover, and systematically engaging with them over multiple social networks. It's essentially doing what a next-generation PR firm should do, directly from your web browser, and for a tiny fraction of the cost. We're about a week away from launching our Dogfood process. While we're migrating it to Intalio|BPP 6.0 (Beta 1 shipped yesterday), we're playing with BuzzGain and will integrate it w...
Looking for Real World Process Patterns
2009-02-11 19:09:00 Much has been said or written about process patterns, but the debate usually focuses on academical theories or technical considerations, both of which get boring pretty fast. What's more interesting (to me at least) is the discovery of real-world process patterns, and their implementation into easy-to-use tools. One such tool is Zapproved.com, and it does a great job at handling the multi-party approval process. The approval process is a great candidate for process automation, for the following reasons: it's asynchronous, it usually involves more than two parties, and it requires auditing and non-repudiation. Zapproved.com is a new Office 2.0 application that does it all, and quite a bit more. Its user interface is very intuitive, and its pricing makes it affordable to virtually any organization (even by today's standards). Another process pattern that is screaming for automation is the multi-party event scheduling process. While publishing a free/busy calendar makes it easier to... More About: World , Real , Patterns , Process
A First Taste of Dogfood
2009-01-25 14:37:00 Our Project Dogfood was launched just two weeks ago, but it's running full speed ahead. Among the most active projects, the Customer Support Process lead by Gene Grell ? Intalio's new Director of Support ? and the Marketing & Public Relations Process, which I am working on with Rick Geneva and Antoine Toulme. Here is a quick update on both, plus a really cool side project that emerged from one of them. First, the Customer Support Process. It's a pretty complex one originated from a custom user interface built in Ruby on Rails, integrated with our new trouble-ticketing system (itself integrated with Salesforce.com), our knowledge database (Confluence), our legacy bug tracking system (Jira), and our original Demand Driven Development (D3) portal (itself to be migrated to a collection of processes running on Intalio|BPP). This process is only a prototype right now, but should be fully implemented within a month or two. In the meantime, feel free to downlo... More About: Taste
Looking for Acquisition Targets
2009-01-19 16:06:00 Toward the end of last year, Intalio's Board of Directors agreed to pursue an aggressive M&A strategy whereby Intalio would buy 8 to 10 Open Source companies over the next 18 to 24 months. We've started to share our strategy with some potential partners, and we've been asked to describe the kind of companies we're looking for. Here is a preliminary set of criteria (highly subject to change). We are looking for companies that have the following characteristics: Small (25 employees is a maximum, less than 10 is preferred, mainly engineers) Open Source or ready to go the COSMO way Exceptional technology that took many person-years to develop Architecture compatible with the one built for Intalio|BPP Support for industry standards (J2EE, WS-*, etc.) Active user base (the larger, the better) Committed customer base (the larger, the better, but small is OK too) Committed employee base (location irrelevant, we're in 13 locations already) Profitable or break-even Little or no debt ... More About: Acquisition
Project Dogfood
2009-01-19 02:59:00 While the current recession is forcing many companies to go through painful rounds of layoffs, Intalio is actually growing its employee base, albeit at a slower rate than in the previous twelve months. There are two reasons for this: Number one, we want to remain on the conservative side, and continue outsourcing most non-core functions, which pretty much means everything outside of architecture design and customer training. Number two, we have started to aggressively use our own products in order to improve our operations, thereby allowing us to do more with less. We call this initiave Project Dogfood. WARNING: very long article, but full reading highly recommended. Project Introduction The idea for Project Dogfood emerged at a recent company meeting, and was refined during our yearly company offsite. The idea is pretty simple: every single employee (36 out of our 60+ full-time collaborators) will develop a new process, or improve an existing one, using our products. The project i...
Intalio is Turning Ten
2009-01-17 16:35:00 This year, Intalio will turn ten. In order to celebrate in style, we just released a brand new website. It outlines the progress we've made during this first decade, and the vision we have for the next. It's a major milestone for us, in two ways: First, it's the first website we built that actually tells a clear story on what Intalio is all about. Second, it's the first Intalio website that I did not design myself. I'm a bit of a control freak, especially when it comes to content and design, and extracting myself from the process was definitely not easy, but it worked out in the end, and we gained a lot more scalability along the way. In developing this new website, we tried to better understand who we are, and what we stand for. Out of this little corporate introspection work emerged the four nucleotides of Intalio's DNA: We are an engineering-driven organization We think process We believe in the virtues of a sustainable commercial open source model We are a truly global o...
BPM is Process Engineering
2008-11-28 14:10:00 In a fairly recent article, Keith Swenson, Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation, explained why BPM is not Software Engineering . While I tend to agree with the article's provocative title, especially if one were to rephrase it as ?BPM is not just Software Engineering,? I disagree with most of the article's content. Keith's definition of ?pure BPM? as a discipline ?where a business person draws a diagram, and it is implemented without any need for Software Engineering? would be considered as naive if it were given by someone who is new to the field of BPM. But coming from an expert like Keith Swenson, it's truly misleading. Keith's core argumentation is slightly confusing, hence I won't go through it thoroughly. Instead, I'll simply refer to its strongest point, which is an analogy drawn between BPM and the spreadsheet, which I first introduced in 2000, and later got published through BPM: The Third Wave, a book I (sort of) co-autho... More About: Process
Why XPDL is Essentially Useless
2008-11-21 15:08:00 From time to time, we receive an RFP requiring support for XPDL. Even though we usually do not answer RFPs (Cf. Don?t RFP, Just DIY), I would like to comment on the need for XPDL, and why we think it's essentially useless. It has been discussed here and there, but customers seem to remain confused about what XPDL is good for, how it relates to BPMN and BPEL, and how anyone could get any value out of it. To be fair, XPDL is certainly the best specification that ever came out of the WfMC. Unfortunately, it does either too much or too little to be really useful. As Jon Pyke (WfMC's former Chairman) said, XPDL's primary goal is to: ?store and exchange the process diagrams, or specifically to allow one tool to model a process diagram, and another to read the diagram and edit, another to ?run' the process model on an XPDL-compliant BPM engine, and so on.? Unfortunately, and further quoting Jon Pyke, ?XPDL is described not as an executable programming language like BPEL, but specifical... More About: Useless
The Process Must Keep Running
2008-11-21 12:11:00 This is a copy of a newsletter sent to all Intalio users, customers, and partners today. Good morning. I hope this email finds you well, and that recent economic developments are not impacting your business too negatively. Every day that passes by seems to bring its lot of bad news. One day, we hear about the Recession. The day after, it turned into a Depression. And yesterday, news broke that the United States, France, and Japan entered into the scary phase of Deflation. Whichever way we look at it, the next few years will be extremely challenging from an economic standpoint, and all businesses must prepare themselves to hunker down in order to survive what is starting to look like the worse economic crisis of modern history. As 2008 comes to an end, I am wrapping up a worldwide roadshow during which I visited 15 countries and flew over 250,000 actual miles (equivalent to 10 around the world trips along the equator). During this tour, I met over 300 customers and partners, and hear... More About: Running , Process
Motivated Marketing Intern Available
2008-11-17 18:52:00 From time to time, I use this blog to promote a cool product or service I came across, or help a friend out. Today, this friend is actually a family member: her name is Sarah, she is my younger sister, 25 year old, studying marketing and business administration at Audencia (one of the top management schools in France), and looking for a one-year internship to start in February or March 2009. Sarah is looking for an internship abroad, ideally in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the United States, working for either a large or a small company, in any vertical industry, in the area of product management, product marketing, or communication. She is fluent in English (she spent six months in the U.S. last year), and very hard working ? she has been working in Denmark for three month every Summer for the past five years picking apples and strawberries to pay for school. If you know of any matching opportunity, please drop me a line. More About: Marketing , Intern
Imagine
2008-11-14 04:28:00 Imagine a BPM tool that could be used by real business people. Imagine a tool that would allow them to document business processes using the simplest notation possible. Imagine a tool that would not only show pretty pictures, but actually turn them into executable processes, at the click of a button. Imagine a tool that could be used on demand, without having to install any software. Imagine a tool that would let business people automate highly-regulated processes such as the financials closing process, without any involvement from IT. Now, imagine such a tool being tightly integrated with the most advanced standards-based BPMS currently available on the market. Such a tool exists today, it has been developed by a little company based in Germany, and Intalio acquired this company today. Before I tell you which company I?m talking about, I would like to give Intalio?s marketing team some time to finish our brand new website, and that?s going to take another week or two. In the meanti... More About: Imagine
Should We Design Processes Like Airplanes?
2008-11-11 15:15:00 As the ongoing discussion about standards for BPM continues, an interesting thread with Mr. Khan of Ultimus fame emerged. In response to his Don?t Forget the BPM Ecosystem article, I explained that standards always play a critical role in the development of mature industries, and drew further analogy to the airline industry that Mr. Khan felt compeled to challenge in a subsequent article. Unfortunately, his appreciation for the standardization that took place in both the commercial and general aviation markets seems to be fairly limited, and certainly not matched by facts that can be easily observed by any pilot today, myself included. The rest of the article is available at BPMLab.org. More About: Design , Airplanes , Processes
Developing a True BPM Ecosystem
2008-11-07 20:58:00 In a recent article, Rashid N. Khan, former founder and CEO of Ultimus, makes a case for diversity in the BPM ecosystem, comparing it to the transportation ecosystem. He then goes on concluding that ?one BPMS will not satisfy all the process needs of an organization, one BPMS vendor is unlikely to meet all the process needs of an organization, [and] one standard will not be suitable for all types of BPMS.? While I have a great deal of respect for what Mr. Khan did at Ultimus, I must disagree with both his analogy and his conclusions. The rest of the article is available at BPMLab.org. More About: True , Ecosystem
Greed is not Good
More articles from this author:2008-11-03 18:59:00 Over the past few weeks, discussions started by the Why BPEL Matters article have gone from mildly engaged to radically passionate, bringing some clarity to otherwise arcane subjects. The need for standards was clarified, and Bruce Silver wrote one of the best analysis of the BPM marketplace I've seen in a long time. While I am thoroughly enjoying this debate, some bloggers are going from passionate to disrespectful, and this is a line I am not willing to cross. In his latest article, Jean-Jacques Dubray, who describes himself as a SOA Enterprise Architect in a large financial institution, must be feeling the impact of the current financial crisis quite acutely, and went ballistic on myself and Intalio's CTO, Assaf Arkin, for no apparent reasons, accusing us of being ?by far the people that are the most responsible for the anemic state of BPM.? In my relatively short career (I am turning 35 tomorrow, and will have worked in the industry for less than 10 years), I have been accused... More About: Greed , Good 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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