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Intalio will also offer (for a fee) an integrated BIRT based reporting tool, a Drools based business rules engine, integration with LifeRay, Alfresco etc. It's also worth keeping in mind that Intalio has had over 10 years in BPM, a strong management team, and an enterprise grade support infrastructure (ticketing system, phone support, etc). Intalio bpms also includes enterprise-level capabilities such as business activity and metrics monitoring, business rules and decision management, document management, mobility support, and system integration tools and portals-- all the features you need and expect in a BPM system, and more. The Enterprise Edition adds some functionality, some support and patent indemnification and is sold as a subscription. This edition, too, includes the full source code for the product with the right to edit it freely. Intalio focuses also on its partner network and invests heavily in it. They have 30 certified and trained resellers of the product.
Intalio, founded in July 1999, is set to go public with a trio of BPMS (business process management system) products that leverage customers' best-of-breed applications while enabling a process-managed enterprise. Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer IsmaelGhalimi met with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Mark Jones to explain how the Intalio n3 BPMS integrates into a company's back-end applications and discuss the delicate subject of his co-opetition with SAP.
InfoWorld: Tell me about Intalio and what you're doing.
Ghalimi: For the last three years [we have been] focusing on marketing communication [standards] with the idea to build an equivalent of SQL for business process management. We founded BPMI.org, for Business Process Management Initiative, two years ago and I am the chairman of that group, which now has about 200 paying members. We released the first version of our product to our early adopters and partners about a year ago, and our first two customers are now in production, including LexisNexis. So we feel that it is the right time to go public and announce the release of Intalio n3 2.0. It's [our] coming-out-of-stealth mode and a fairly exciting time.
InfoWorld: The business process management space is pretty crowded. How do you differentiate yourself?
Ghalimi: What we are doing is a business process management system, which is a particular architecture for achieving business process management. The best way to define ourself is to take a look at the BPM market at large and to understand that it's mostly made of players that come from the BI space and from the EAI space. Those products have very significant limitations, namely for the EAI products. They are usually limited to the messaging system that the vendors already own, so if you want to use Tibco's BPM, you'll have to use Tibco's [messaging system]; if you want to use Vitria's BPM, you have to use their messaging system.
InfoWorld: So standards have not been put in place then?
Ghalimi: Absolutely. We strongly believe that MQ Series plus a J2EE application server -- be it WebSphere or WebLogic -- is the standard that we need, so we built our business process management engine, our process server, on top of [that].
InfoWorld: Exactly where in the IT stack does your software run?
Ghalimi: Above the WebSphere or Web Logic application server and above the messaging system, which is optional. If you do not have a messaging system, then we can talk directly to the back-end applications because we have OEM'd connectors from Actional and Insevo. It runs on top of the app server for our process server, which is one of the three main components of our product. [We] have the design tool, Designer, which is used by both business analysts and software engineers to design and execute the whole process. [The Design tool] has a Windows look and feel to it, so you can run it on top of any operating system or workstation laptop. One of the main differences compared to other products in the BPM space is that with our product you do not have to write code.
InfoWorld: Will you be announcing Design as well as Intalio n3?
Ghalimi: Yes. In fact [we have] three [announcements], product wise: The Design tool, the server running on top of the app server and the messaging system, and then what we call Director, which is a process portal framework that is mostly based on a new technology called XPage, which allows you to develop very interactive Web pages without having to juggle multiple languages. Today you'd have to [juggle] with JSP, Java Server Pages, plus HTML [and] XML because that's how the data will come from the back end. We've aggregated all that to develop a WYSIWYG tool for building Web pages that's called the Page Designer. This is going to come in Intalio 2.1, most likely at the end of Q1 or Q2. [It's] very similar to Microsoft Front Page, but instead of generating static HTML it generates dynamic HTML.
InfoWorld: Is your target customer a business analyst as opposed to a developer?
Ghalimi: It's really a mix of the two. We are not claiming that our environment could be used by business analysts only to implement a fully executable process that would be integrated within ERP. The idea is to have an environment that can allow the business analysts to specify the process and then the software engineers to just extend that process without having to write code. The customer for our product is really the CIO, who is more and more playing the role of bridging the gap between the business side and the [developer] side.
InfoWorld: How do you go about integrating that process into an enterprise's back-end applications?
Ghalimi: We cover 145 packaged applications, either through the connectors that we [build] ourselves or through the connectors that we have OEM'd from Actional and Insevo. Typically, anything you could add in your back-end SAP [or] PeopleSoft, we connect to it directly. On top of that [we] dynamically expose all those APIs as Web services on the fly without you having to write code, both for standard APIs that would come [with] SAP, for example, as well as the custom ones. Everything that we touch from your back-end systems applications is automatically translated into a Web service that becomes a ready-to-use component that you can include in any kind of business process. On top of that, which is unique to Intalio, we have the ability to show the processes themselves that are in SAP, in Siebel, in PeopleSoft, in Oracle apps, as opposed to just the APIs.
InfoWorld: What you're describing gels with the idea that companies are looking for best-of-breed applications.
Ghalimi: Absolutely. Our model is for companies that have acquired multiple packaged applications. They standardized on, let's say, WebLogic for the app server [and] MQ Series for the messaging system; that's a perfect environment for our product to sit on top of and manage the end-to-end processes that do not exist in any of those packages and, in fact, should not exist. We are [about] valuated, best-in-class processes that [you] should not be able to find in any packaged application.
InfoWorld: Are you competing against SAP and their xApps architecture?
Ghalimi: It would be fair to say that SAP learned a lot from our architecture. SAP Ventures is an investor in our company, SAP was a very active participant in both BPMI.org and the development of WSCI [Web Services Choreography Interface], and they've just applied to become a member of the board of directors for BPMI.org.
InfoWorld: So even though you've been in stealth mode, SAP's been mining your intelligence?
Ghalimi: To a large degree. What you find with SAP xApps [and] NetWeaver, which is really XI 1.0, and what you find with Siebel UAN [Universal Application Network] is very much an adaptation of our architecture model. From what we understand, SAP is not going to ship xApps -- or I should say XI 2.0 -- which is going to be their BPMS, for at least a couple of years. They started on XI [and] NetWeaver. Instead of buying best-of-breed technologies from a Tibco or a Web Methods for the process layer, Intalio, they decided to build everything from scratch and that takes time. That means that we have a fantastic window of opportunity. We have about two years to [focus on] talking to their customers.
InfoWorld: One of the recommendations analysts give to technologists who are evaluating these architectures is 'Go with the ones that have the strongest partnerships.' Who are your partners?
Ghalimi: Our partnerships are [with] the leading process modeling tool vendors: IDS Scheer, Casewise, Popking, and Proforma. We also partner with the leading vendors of middleware systems, namely BEA and Tibco. [We're] still in discussions with IBM; that one should come soon. And we partner with the consultant firms -- currently we have a global alliance with CSC. In fact, they have decided to standardize on Intalio for every BPM project that they do.
InfoWorld: I noticed you didn't mention Microsoft.
Ghalimi: We don't mention Microsoft for several reasons. Our architecture is very much J2EE centric. Down the road we will be able to run on top of .Net when the Web service stack will consolidate and we'll have all the services we need, not only WSDL but also WS Security and WS Transaction. Today we just interoperate with .Net through WSDL Web services. What's interesting is that IBM and Microsoft in September released BPEL4WS, [which] is a major news for us because before that you had many different languages for processes -- BPML [Business Process Modeling Language] being one of them, but you [also] had WSFL from IBM and XLang from Microsoft. Those two were very incompatible. So even though BPEL is not yet BPML, at least the two languages are very much the same and have the same mathematical model. The only difference is that BPML is a little bit more mature and has a couple of things that are still lacking in BPEL.
InfoWorld: Such as?
Ghalimi: Such as nested processes, [which] is the ability for a process to [close] itself at some point with all its context information, so you can have multiple vested processes that would share the same data. That's very useful in many, many business scenarios and not found yet in BPEL. They say they will support vested processes down the road, so we are preempting that and inviting them to have a merge of the two specifications. At the end of the day, what we care about is for one standard to emerge. We believe in the necessity of having one standard so customers don't have to make a choice.
InfoWorld: What is going to be the core value proposition of BPM?
Ghalimi: The question we would answer to is 'What's going to be the core value proposition of the BPMS?' One of them is support for a standard process modeling language. You don't have support in most of the BPM products for any of those languages [and] that support is very, very important. The value proposition for the customer is, for example, I can use my existing process modeling tool, like IDS Scheer ARIS, and deploy my processes onto this kind of system. The second thing is not having to write code. If you take a look at the J2EE APIs or the Microsoft .Net APIs, it's mind blowing how many APIs you have to [load] to do things with those. And then on the workflow side, what we are discovering more and more is that workflow systems are pretty much all incompatible with each other. .. We have the ability with our product to consolidate all this workflow systems onto a single management system which is not only doing workflow but also business process integration and process information. That's the value proposition on the workflow side.
On the application side, SAP announced that they are going [withdraw] support for four out of six releases of SAP R3 by the end of the year. So by the end of the year, 50 percent [of SAP's customer base] will have to make the migration. .. Our answer to that is, why don't you use our BPMS to redo that customization at the process level as opposed to the application level? It's much less expensive, because you can use our tools for doing that as opposed to writing code. Second, next time SAP comes back with such a deal, you don't have to do that [migration] again because the customization was outside. That's the killer app for BPMS itself: Abstraction from the packaged application, so that you are not kept hostage by the release cycle of those products.
InfoWorld: How would you measure the ROI for the migration of SAP?
Ghalimi: We still have to see what would be the cost of making the customization and enable of the process layer as opposed to SAP. We have very strong indication that it will be significantly less expensive. The ROI for the next upgrade would be very simple: You would just have to pay for the software. So when you say $15 million, that's typically $3 million for the software license, and $12 for the system integration. When you have the next upgrade, you still have to pay $3 million for the software, and the system integration would go down from $12 [million] to $1 [million] or $2 [million]. That's your ROI [on the] migration. That's the kind of tactical return on investment you can expect when you use our product.
Professional Edition
Ask anyone who deals with reengineering the way a company does business, and they can tell you horror stories about getting software to adapt to changing business processes.
Currently, enterprise application integration (EAI) and middleware providers offer some form of workflow or business process management (BPM). But it's typically a task that requires the programming equivalent of extreme mountain climbing skills, especially in situations with applications from several vendors and multiple, independent processes that must be coordinated.
Intalio, a nearly four-year-old company specializing in BPM, may have cracked the code for ridding BPM of its rough edges and steep costs. The company's Intalio n³ 2.0 software can reduce the development cost of designing and implementing business processes by up to 75 percent, according to Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio co-founder and chief strategy officer.
That reduction comes primarily through eliminating the need for manual coding and by treating processes-not just data and applications-as the fundamental building blocks of corporate information systems, Ghalimi told me during an interview last week.
I am highly skeptical of the programming-for-non-programmers claim, but Intalio appears to have some validity. The software provides a visual interface for designing end-to-end business processes, including messaging, data transformation, transactions, and business rules. Existing business process models, procedures and rules can be imported and exposed for use within the Intalio environment without writing code. With the click of a button, visual maps are turned into executable code that runs on the Intalio server.
For corroboration, I talked to Eric Austvold, research director at AMR Research who covers the BPM marketplace. He was also impressed with Intalio's BPM platform.
'Intalio represents the next way to shrink the cycle time of bringing new products to market, dynamically creating relationships with suppliers, building data exchange pipelines and mapping out the business processes,' Austvold said. 'Today it takes months and a number of development tools. Intalio consolidates a number of development tools into the Intalio n3 environment.'
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In addition to a single, integrated environment--which Ghamili calls a process-oriented IDE (Interface Development Environment)--Intalio abstracts the design of business processes from specific implementations. As an example, if a company is using enterprise applications such as SAP and PeopleSoft, Intalio introspects them at the API and the process level, including Web services. If a business process in SAP and one in PeopleSoft perform a similar function, Intalio generates a single process and links it to both applications. You end up with a single, application-independent business process that works across both applications.
This architecture-which also allows for reuse of processes and dynamic changes at execution time--offers for far more flexibility than traditional EAI or workflow solutions. Intalio also includes adapters and connectors for a broad range of applications and middleware. XPage, Intalio's XML-based language, replaces the use of several languages, including JSP, Java, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, HTML, and CSS.
Intalio's visual development environment and ease of use are rooted in its support of emerging process modeling languages. Visual models are converted into BPML (Business Process Modeling Language) or BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) code. Ghamili estimates that 50,000 to100,000 lines of J2EE code could be replaced by 100 lines of BPML code.
Intalio was a co-founder of the organization www.bpmi.org that created BPML, hoping to establish a standard, platform-independent meta-language as a foundation for its products and the market. Subsequently, a consortium of IBM, Microsoft, and BEA systems developed BPEL4WS in competition with BPML. Intalio was smart to support both in its product. At some point the two modeling languages could merge into a single standard; with IBM, Microsoft and BEA driving BPEL4WS, it's not difficult to determine which faction is in the driver's seat.
WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface) is also in the picture. WSCI defines the interaction between services deployed across multiple systems, and facilitates interoperability between BPML and BPEL4WS, which define the business processes behind each service. Intalio, along with BEA, SAP and Sun, co-developed the WSCI 1.0 specification.
Austvold believes that Intalio could have a major impact just as Oracle did in creating the relational database market. But, he also sees significant obstacles along the road.'Intalio has an academic lead,' Austvold said. 'A number of companies, such as IBM with WebSphere, Microsoft with BizTalk and smaller firms like Fuego, Lombardi Software, and Savion are pursuing BPM, but at this point Intalio has thought through the problem of managing business processes in an enterprise better than any company in the planet. The biggest challenge for the company is surviving in this [economic] ice age of technology.'
The company currently has a few showcase customers, including BAE Systems, iUniverse, LexisNexus and Computer Sciences Corporation. With an average pricing target between $500,000 to $1 million, however, Intalio will require high-level buy in, with participation from both business and IT constituents in most corporations.
From Ghalimi's perspective, Intalio goes a long way toward bridging the gap between business and IT. Business owners have a tool that allows them to model business processes without worrying about the underlying code and complexities, and technical staff have flexible, fast tool to help them align with the business priorities.
Intalio Bpm Enterprise Edition Download
Intalio appears to have made significant progress in delivering plug and play BPM. Now it's up to the market to decide if it can be the next Oracle.
Quickbooks Enterprise Edition
What are your experiences in bringing business process management into your organization? Leave a message in our TalkBack forum or e-mail me at dan.farber@cnet.com.