Tonight, Intalio shipped Intalio|BPMS 4.0 to a first group of early adopters. This shipment marks Intalio’s return to its Open Source roots, a landmark in the development of the BPM 2.0 concept we introduced last week, and the most significant release we’ve ever made: BPMN process designer in Eclipse, BPEL 2.0 server deployed on top of Apache Geronimo, and BPEL4People workflow interface built with an AJAX implementation of the XForms specification.

Intalio|BPMS 4.0 adds a new AJAX management console for the BPEL 2.0 server. This tool was developed for the U.S. Department of Energy in order to manage a grid of 1,000 servers where our process engine has been deployed. We figured that if we could make the console work for 1,000 servers, it would also work for one or two, so we included it as part of the current release. The console uses the same UI technology as the workflow interface, which is based on an AJAX-powered XForms engine deployed on top of the Apache-incubated Tobago JSF framework. As a result, the end-user interface is consistent across all components and some functionalities, such as the ability to automatically generate a form out of a WSDL file, can be reused by multiple components.

The only piece that is missing in this release is a new version of our much-loved schema-to-schema mapper. Two months ago, we realized that we could not keep the mapper we had developed for our BPML-based product, mainly because BPEL’s way of dealing with data is an order of magnitude more complex than BPML’s. As a result, we had to implement a brand-new object model for the data modeling part of our BPMN process designer, and come up with a new graphical user interface for it. Good news: the new object model is ready and we have a very sexy object editor for it. Bad news: we could not complete the development of the graphical mapper on time. Instead of delaying the release any further, we decided to ship with the object editor only. We will make a point release quickly after that will include the new mapper. The object editor is extremely powerful, but a lot more complex to use than the upcoming mapper, so if you’re one of our early adopters, please be patient, read our documentation thoroughly, come to our training sessions, and be assured that a better solution will be available soon.

Obviously, a lot more work remains to be done. We just started the development of our WYSIWYG editor for workflow forms, and have invited some customers to participate in the funding of this project in exchange for the early inclusion of features they have a specific need for. We are also furthering our integration with the Celequest BAM technology which we recently added to our platform, while starting work with the rule engine vendor we selected and to be announced very soon. We managed to include the ServiceMix ESB into the current release, but are currently looking at various options for supporting other ESB offerings as well. Also, discussions with a couple of vendors for meta-data repositories and content management systems are under way and we expect to select our partners sometime in March. At that point, our BPMS will include all dimensions of Gartner’s definition of a BPM suite. We won’t make it onto Gartner’s magic quadrant for BPMS though, for our yearly revenues will be lower than the arbitrary $20M limit imposed by the quadrant’s author. I guess Gartner’s customers will have to get the scoop some other way…

The new distribution model we adopted two months ago is starting to bear fruits: we generated more qualified leads in the last six weeks than we did in the past six years. Following the successful setup of our offshore engineering group in Ukraine, we decided to open telesales offices in India and Ireland in order to keep up with increasing demand for our software and services. We are also extending our support capabilities in India and are currently looking for technical partners in Europe in order to provide 24/7 support on a worldwide basis.

Trainings sessions are now taking place almost every week, both in North America and Western Europe. We are also in the process of certifying third-party system integrators who will be able to organize training sessions in other geographies.

Because we want to give our users the best experience possible, we are releasing Intalio|BPMS in an incremental manner. We started tonight with a group of ten early adopters, and will ship to more and more users week after week. By March, we expect the platform to be stable enough that we can make a first generally available release. In the meantime, we thank you for your support.