Intalio recently announced the release of the first Open Source BPMS to support BPMN, BPEL and BPEL4People. As was expected, competitors were quick to point out that you only get what you pay for and should buy their products instead if you want an enterprise-class BPMS, or as my good friend Phil Gilbert pointed out, need one that “matches the needs for your business”. The Open Source Initiative’s definition of Open Source includes free distribution. As such, Intalio’s Open Source BPMS and its cousin the Intalio|BPMS Community Edition are free, in the sense that you do not have to pay any software license to use them, even when going into production. But free does not necessarily mean cheap, limited in functionality, or poor in quality. In fact, I would argue that the reverse is true.

As Martin LaMonica from CNET News.com wrote in his article published earlier this morning, the Intalio|BPMS is very much a “high-end business process server and designer tool set”. We make it free from a licensing standpoint because until now, Intalio was somehow one of the best-kept secrets in the industry and we recently set out to change that. So with Intalio|BPMS Community Edition, the only thing you pay for is our optional support and maintenance services. The Community Edition is free but limited to deployments with the Apache Geronimo application server and the MySQL database. If you want to upgrade to a different aplication server or database, you can purchase the Enterprise Edition, which is essentially the same product without any deployment restriction. It will cost you $25,000 per CPU, which still makes it one of the most cost-effective solutions to be available on the market today. I tend to think that we have a pretty fair deal here, for all involved.

Before we moved to this new business model, licensing costs for a BPMS would be close to $250,000 for an initial deployment and almost double that if one were to add an enterprise-class Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) component and a set of connectors to packaged applications such as SAP. I do not know about you, but I always thought that half a million dollars is a pretty high barrier to adoption. Even though I remain convinced that a good BPMS is worth every penny you could pay for it, I also believe that its potential for dramatically changing the way enterprise software gets developed in the future cannot be unlocked without lowering the initial barrier to adoption. Like it or not, it’s just not the way customers want to pay for the value they get out of enterprise software today, which is precisely why Network Appliances, Software as a Service and Open Source are getting so much traction these days.

When we published the first paper on BPMS in June 2000, we had no idea that this concept would become so prevalent. It took six years for Gartner to adopt it, but we remain committed to the original vision and are working hard to change the economics of the game so that the widest audience can benefit from this amazing piece of software.

Sometimes, you get more than what you pay for, and it sure feels good.