IT|ReduxIT|ReduxNew Rules for a New IT World. Home of BPM 2.0 and Office 2.0. Articles
Why Standards Matter
2008-11-02 10:52:00 A month ago, the Why BPEL Matter s article was posted on IT|Redux, and triggered a wave of discussions rarely seen in the little BPM microcosm. Initially, they focused on arcane mathematical considerations supported by pseudo-scientific arguments on both sides of the fence (here and there). But as the debate progressed, what is at stake for those opposed to BPEL as standard process execution language became clear, and the motivations for supporting their side of the argument painfully evident: disregard for the value of standards, and focus on the needs of vendors rather than the interest of customers (Cf. this article and that one). Let's take a closer look at what this healthy debate brought under the spotlight. The rest of the article is available at BPMLab.org. More About: Standards
BPMI.org Redux
2008-10-26 11:04:00 A breakthrough, finally! After almost a month of back and forth discussions started by the now-infamous why BPEL matters post, and continued on InfoQ, the Workflow Patterns Google Group, and countless posts on this very blog, we finally reached a conclusion, drawn by Bruce Silver and relayed by David French. They are calling for the industry to develop a ?Compliance Specification for BPMN? that would define the ?elements, attributes, and flow patterns that must be supported to claim BPMN support.? What a great idea! Now, let's take a look at how such a specification should be developed, and who could take the lead for such a project. As of today, several things are missing to make BPMN a true standard in the industry. First, as Bruce Silver pointed out, BPMN's semantics are ?vague? and need to be clarified, especially with respect to the elements of the specification that should drive the generation of executable processes. Second, there is no standard interchange format for BPMN ...
Why All This Matters
2008-10-24 21:30:00 Some regular readers of this blog seem to be surprised by the passion I am showing in promoting the BPMN+BPEL cause. For many, BPEL is just another execution language for processes, and what really matters is their notation. For me, it is the very embodiment of the vision I have been trying to realize for over nine years now. It has been a long and tortuous road, partially illustrated by this past article, and I need to shed some lights on some of its detours in order for outsiders to really appreciate why all this matters, to me and my team at the very least. When I started Intalio back in 1999, I had a pretty clear vision for the platform I wanted to build, but I did not know what to call it. For lack of a better term, I described it as a Transactional Workflow System. In a nutshell, it would allow less-technical people to build transactional applications by drawing simple flow charts. I presented my vision to Intalio's co-founder and CTO, Assaf Arkin, and he hated it, with a ven... More About: Matters
Some More BPEL Fun
2008-10-24 18:47:00 The more I'm writing about BPEL, the more people I seem to be annoying. The latest to date is Keith Swenson from Fujitsu, who seems to be pleased by InfoQ's recent article, and more than happy to join the BPEL bashing party. I call them legacy workflow vendors. They call us EAI folks. Touché! This is so much fun? But let's take a look at why their arguments just don't hold. In all these articles, the main argument seems to be that BPEL is a poorly-designed language for allowing business analysts to describe business processes. Well, guess what? Of course it is! For two reasons: first, it has never been designed to be used by human beings. Two, no business analyst who respect herself would ever use a programming language to begin with, be it BPEL, XPDL, or any other character-based language. So where on Earth did these self-proclaimed BPM experts read anyone claiming that BPEL was good for business analysts? The thing is, nobody ever said or wrote that. What was stated instead is...
COSMO Logo
2008-10-24 17:26:00 Since we published our original article on COSMO, we have been approached by the CEOs of several Commercial Open Source companies who expressed interest for the model and were thinking about using it for marketing purposes. We have no idea where this whole thing will end up, but we're happy to take it a few steps further, and here is the first one: a logo, courtesy of SolutionSet. If your commercially supported Open Source software follows the high-level guidelines we defined in our original article, feel free to use it and link to cosmo.itredux.com. We're also very interested to hear about your feedback regarding these guidelines, and how they could be improved upon. More About: Logo , Cosmo
BPM 2.0, Pi-Calculus, and BPO
2008-10-24 11:59:00 Two years ago, I complained that BPM had lost its appeal as a technology, acknowledging a dearth of public discussions on the topic. Well, I should have been careful about what I wished for, for I definitely got it, in droves. The partisan debate has been fueled again, ignited with this post, relayed by InfoQ with proper Intalio bashing, then followed on this Google Group, with lots of bogus pseudo-scientific statements to make for a fascinating read. To be clear: I'm loving every part of it. BPM is a topic I am passionate about, and a field I dedicated my (short) career to. But let's make no mistake: this silly discussion about BPEL and Pi-Calculus is more than a marketing spin on things most of us will never fully understand (myself included). It has been brought forth for a very important reason: true distributed process execution is of the utmost importance for BPM's killer application: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Let me explain why. The enterprise software industry i...
BPEL and Pi-Calculus
2008-10-23 12:20:00 Apparently, my last article on why BPEL matters ruffled some feathers. My arguments about why BPEL is better than XPDL on purely mathematical grounds are upsetting some ?academics?, and I am being portrayed as a shallow marketer for making such unsubstantiated statements. I love nothing more than a fair fight, and I am pleased to see that such discussions are finally making their way online, proving that the issues at hand really matter. So let's get back on the ring! I made the claim that BPEL leverages the Pi-Calculus model, and as a result is more suited to support the execution of distributed processes. The ?academic? refuting this claim countered that BPEL does not support the ?distinguising feature of pi-calculus compared to other members of the process algebra family,? namely channel passing. Well, I beg to differ, and Assaf Arkin, CTO of Intalio, author of the BPML specification, and co-author of the BPEL specification would as well, as can be seen on this article. My perso...
Making It All Work
2008-10-17 18:33:00 Today, I received an advanced uncorrected proof of David Allen's upcoming sequel to Getting Things Done, titled Making It All Work . The book will be released in December, so I won't tell you much about it, for I really don't like spoilers. Instead, I will just share the following opening quote, which I found amazingly insightful. The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. ?Alfred North Whitehead Whitehead was the father of process philosophy, and one of my very many projects (currently labeled with a ?Lifetime? horizon in my Salesforce.com system) is to better understand how the work of Kurt Gödel, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig Wittgenstein contributed to shape modern 20th Century thinking, redefining our understanding of Reality?a Reality defined by constant change and absolute relativism. Many thanks to David and Richard for sharing this advanced copy with me.
Updated Travel Schedule
2008-10-16 22:02:00 As of today, Intalio has user organizations in over 100 countries, and paying customers in 42 of them. Most of our deals are closed over the phone, but we like to meet our customers and partners in person from time to time. For this purpose, we're expanding our roadshow to all five continents, organizing as many cocktails as possible. Here are the places where we will have one in the coming six months. Nov 11: London, UK Nov 12: Berlin, DE Nov 12: Munich, DE Nov 13: Paris, FR Nov 18: New York, NY Dec 9-11: Tokyo, JP Jan 19 Sao Paulo, BR Jan 20 Buenos Aires, AR Jan 21 Santiago, CL Jan 22 Quito, EC Jan 23 Caracas, VE Feb 9 Beijing, CN Feb 10 Shanghai, CN Feb 11 Singapore, SG Feb 12 Kuala Lumpur, MY Feb 13 Bangalore, IN Feb 23: London, UK Feb 24: Paris, FR Feb 25: Venice, IT Feb 26: Munich, DE Feb 27: Helsinki, FI If you want to learn more about BPM 2.0, COSMO, and Intalio 6.0, meet me there! More About: Travel , Schedule
Adding Data to Processes
2008-10-16 20:02:00 Business Process Management (BPM) differs from Workflow in many ways, but its native support for data might be the most critical one. When BPML was introduced eight years ago, its most fundamental innovation (later embraced by BPEL) was to treat data as an integral dimension of processes, rather than simple parameters of workflow activities. Assaf Arkin, Intalio's CTO, deserves credit for such a major contribution to the field of enterprise computing. Nevertheless, neither BPML nor BPEL went far enough along the data axis, and never allowed developers to properly manage data objects or entities. Instead, it relied on a service model to access externally-managed entities, and only cared to carry the process' data, thereby limiting the BPMS' ability to be used as a general purpose development platform for enterprise applications. This is about to change, and once again, Intalio is on a mission to bring such innovation to the market. Let's take a look at what's coming up? At a hig... More About: Data , Processes
The Great Migration
2008-10-15 14:02:00 As we further pored through Intalio's results for the past quarter (call to be scheduled), we stumbled upon a very interesting combination of events: for the first time since Gartner's Magic Quadrant for BPM Suites was published in November 2007, at least one existing customer for every single vendor in the Leader quadrant decided to migrate to Intalio's product. Something is going on here? There were 10 vendors in the Leader quadrant, and it used to be that we'd get migrations from one or two every quarter. But this past quarter, migrations started from all of them, for a variety of reasons: failed projects (Cf. yesterday's post), reduced budgets for new projects, need for a complete stack including components such as BRE, DMS, or ESB, etc. But two reasons were invoked consistently for justifying such migrations: number one, the desire to move to a commercially-supported Open Source platform (Cf. COSMO); number two, the requirement for supporting the two standards that really ... More About: Great
Don't RFP, Just DIY
2008-10-14 10:54:00 Here is something you won't hear from many BPM vendors: more than 50% of all BPM projects fail, and the few that succeed do not lead to any repeat sales 3 times out of 4. Across the board, BPM shows one of the poorest track records of any enterprise software category. What is to blame? A broken technology adoption process. Up until now, most enterprise customers have selected BPM products through a traditional Request For Proposal (RFP) process. They compiled huge laundry lists of features suggested by analyst firms and enriched by all possible stakeholders in the organization, submitted them to a dozen vendors for initial selection, invited three of four for a bake-off, then selected the winner based on its ability to deliver a Proof of Concept in a relatively short period of time (typically three to five business days). Of the three vendors invited for the PoC, one spent the entire week trying to install the product, another managed to get the product installed in a day or two, b...
More on BPM 2.0 and CEP
2008-10-13 06:03:00 My recent post on BPM 2.0 and Complex Event Processing started quite a few discussions, some online (like this one with Bruce Silver and Paul Vincent), some offline with a few prominent CEP vendors, who seemed to agree with my position. Let's give it another shot and see where this takes us. First, some external validation that BPEL is perfectly suited for describing complex event patterns: Coral8, one of the leading independent CEP vendors, recently developed a very cool BPEL to CCL compiler that takes standard BPEL code and translates it into CCL, Coral8's SQL-based programming language that offers a fast, natural way to develop CEP applications. This compiler is now being used by SAP to deploy CEP applications from BPEL code generated by their BPMN designer. Once again, the BPMN+BPEL duo is proving that standards matter (Cf. Why BPEL Matters). Second, the fact that one vendor's BPEL engine was not appropriate for CEP and led that vendor to embed a third-party CEP engine (Cf. P...
Meet Me There
2008-10-10 20:31:00 I crossed the 200,000 qualifying miles for the year two days ago, and still have almost a quarter to make it to 250,000 before the year ends. It's equivalent to ten times the Earth's circumference (24,899 miles at the equator). What this means is that I spend an insane amount of time in planes, and visit quite a few places throughout the year. Unfortunately, I do not get to stay very long at any one location, for my trips are usually scheduled to last less than three days in order to minimize the impact of jet lag on my aging body. In order to make it easier for you to meet me whenever I happen to be visiting your area, I have added a Meet Me There section on this blog's right column, and will announce my upcoming trips through regular posts. Here are the ones that have been scheduled for the rest of the year. November 11: London, UK We will be visiting some customers and partners there, and will organize a cocktail presentation of Intalio in the evening. The event will take plac...
Why COSMO Matters During a Recession
2008-10-10 18:17:00 During a recession, budgets get cut, and money is spent only for things that are absolutely necessary to a company's survival. As a result, many projects get delayed, across the board, and IT projects are no exception. In fact, for the many companies that bought into Nicholas Carr's view that IT doesn't matter, IT budgets are among the first to be cut, which is the reason why the stocks of so many publicly-traded software companies are taking a plunge as I am writing these lines. Nevertheless, life must go on, even during the darkest hours of the mot brutal recession, and many projects still must be carried on, albeit with limited budgets. In such a context, using software licensed through the COSMO model might really help. Let me explain why. The fundamental problem with the traditional software licensing model based on perpetual licenses is that it requires the acquisition of expensive licenses upfront, funded from a capital expenditure budget line. If the budget is not availab... More About: Cosmo , Recession , Matters
COSMO
2008-10-09 06:03:00 For the past three years, Intalio has developed a Commercial Open Source Model (COSMO) that gives users and customers most of the benefits of the traditional Open Source model (as defined by the OSI), while granting vendors a truly sustainable business model as software companies, primarily based on license revenues. In order to refine this model and promote it with customers and vendors alike, we have defined the following set of guidelines, which will be further discussed on this blog. Edition Layering Past and current evidence suggests that no software company has ever been successful at generating the kind of gross margins that traditional software companies can produce, over an extended period of time (more than 5 years), while releasing 100% of their code under an OSI-approved license. A broadly accepted answer to this challenge is layering, whereby a subset of the product is available for free and/or under an Open Source license, while the complete product can only be used in... More About: Cosmo
On Multi Tenancy
2008-10-07 02:35:00 Apparently, Sandy Kemsley was not too happy about the way OMG's BPM Think Tank is evolving, and neither was Bruce Silver. Nevertheless, her remarks about Intalio's participation in the BPM On Demand Panel are a bit off base. Sandy's point seems to be that deploying Intalio|Server on Amazon EC2 does not qualify it as an on-demand offering, for it's supposedly not multi-tenant. While I usually respect Sandy's technical judgement and am eagerly awaiting her review of Intalio|BPMS 5.2, I cannot help but disagree with her statement. First and foremost, the definition of multi-tenancy is a very lose one. If you define it as the ability to run processes from multiple customers on the same physical server, then Intalio|Server Powered by Amazon EC2 certainly qualifies. If you restrict the definition to deployment models that rely on a single instance for the entire software stack, then even established SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com would not qualify, for they run multiple instance... More About: Multi
Who Will Buy Intalio?
2008-10-06 06:03:00 From time to time, a customer or a prospect will ask for our balance sheet in order to make sure that we're sufficiently funded (we are). Once satisfied with what they saw, many of them go on to ask the next logical question: ?What is your exit strategy?? Since the IPO market for technology companies is essentially shut down, the very next question becomes: ?Who will buy Intalio?? Now that we have something pretty cool going for us, we're really not interested by a quick exit, which is precisely the reason why we brought new investors on board back in the Summer of 2007 (Partech International). We're here to build a business, and could not care less about an exit strategy. So, the right question to ask really is: ?Who will Intalio buy next?? The first company we acquired was FiveSight Technologies, which gave us the PXE BPEL engine that was eventually donated to the Apache Software Foundation to serve as codebase for Apache ODE. This acquisition allowed us to return to an Open So...
Intalio Business Process Platform
2008-10-05 22:44:00 I am in Japan today for the Intalio User Conference, where we unveiled Intalio 6.0 for the very first time to the public. This Business Process Platform based on the COSMO model is architected around Intalio's BPEL engine, and offers three main editions: Developer Edition, Enterprise Edition, and On Demand Edition, the later being packaged both for public clouds (like Amazon EC2) and private ones (popular with BPO vendors). Here is what it looks like. Many new things are depicted on this diagram, and I'll spend the next few days taking you through them. Among them, Intalio|MDM, but also the four new components that make Intalio On Demand Edition: the Online BPMN Designer, Online SimPEL Editor, Process Portal, and Mashup Templates. Stay tuned? More About: Business Process
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
More articles from this author: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... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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