Recently Intalio, Inc., an Open
Source BPMS company, announced Intalio|On Demand, an open
source Business Process Management System delivered as a service.
Intalio|On Demand is available by signing up at www.intalio.com/on-demand.
The subscription for the service starts at $1,500 for each dedicated
server, and includes bandwidth, licenses, maintenance, and support.
Users can receive a free 5-day evaluation. (more info at Intalio.com)
The three biggest movements within the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) world, and Business Process Management (BPM) - whether integrated into or stand-alone from ECM - are:
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
- Open Source
- Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007)
(Note: While MOSS is not typically associated with "high-end" BPM offerings, the impact of MOSS on the market, now that Microsoft has realized they can apparently make a billion dollars USD a year on that platform without seriously trying, means that it is a force to be reckoned with, and in many cases, the light-weight BPM provided by MOSS can accomplish most of what typical enterprises are expecting for entry-point workflow that is non-transactional and not at a high-volume.)
These burgeoning movements are not mutually exclusive, and one should not expect that traditonally licensed, on-premise solutions are going to disappear any time soon.
What makes this announcement by Intalio intriguing is this ability to mix and match the solution, based on the deploying customer's need.
While it is not terribly rare to "host" open source with a third party, truly architecting an "on-demand" or SaaS offering is a bit more complicated than installing and running a new instance, and it does appear that this is the first marriage of Open Source and SaaS.
Is this the best of both worlds? Hard to say this early in this model, but as a conceptual model, it would seem to be path to take moving forward.
This use of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (known as EC2) is relatively rare for "enterprise" applications (vs. the consumer-oriented usage of so many of the Web 2.0 startups, such as twitter) at this point, and given some of the issues of Amazon's cloud infrastructure blacking out in recent months, this is by no means a bulletproof solution. But nothing is, and the illusion of perfect uptime is preventing traditional IT shops from taking advantage of the speed and flexibility that SaaS has to offer. The ability to layer solutions with both on-premise and cloud-based solutions is a model that has been proven to work. Akamai as one of the pioneers in providing an elastic/scalable ability to provide fast access to large multimedia files is part of what has made Apple's iTunes Music Store the success that it has been.
Given Intalio's adherence to (and apparent dedication to) open standards for connecting between systems, one should hope that the ability to mix and match Intalio's offerings, under the hood, should be fairly seamless. Whether you start with the on-demand model, or the on-premise, the nature of BPM and BPM as "process glue" makes this a perfect meta-layer where the architecture SHOULD be possible to modularize.
Both buyers and suppliers should keep an eye on this model, and consider the ramifications from a budget standpoint, flexibility in deployment, and time to deliver new offerings, or upgrade existing technology-based solutions.
