Yesterday, Red Hat acquired JBoss for $420 Million. A week before, TA Associates announced a $200 Million buyout of Global 360. Both acquisitions are interesting in the sense that they create wonderful opportunities for others to develop their businesses in creative ways.

The JBoss acquisition is pretty good news for Intalio, for it should lead more and more jBPM users to migrate to Intalio|BPMS. When discussing with such users, three main reasons are consistently invoked for migrating: no need to write Java code (design BPMN diagrams instead), native BPEL 2.0 runtime, and more liberal licensing terms (Apache License vs LPGL). The only request we get is to add support for the JBoss J2EE application server to our Community Edition, which currently only supports Apache Geronimo. This is something that we are considering and should have an answer to in the next two to three weeks.

The Global 360 buyout is intruiguing. Bruce Silver posted an interesting article on the subject, and I still cannot figure out whether the new owner will keep developing Global 360’s products, or will want to milk that cow with minimal investments instead, much like Computer Associates does with most of its acquisitions. In any case, this type of acquisition of legacy workflow vendors, similar to the Staffware acquisition made by TIBCO last year, creates an opportunity for a vendor like Intalio to help existing customers migrate to an Open Source and standards-based BPM solution. If you’re one of these customers and worry about the long-term support for the product you are currently using, feel free to give us a buzz. And if several such customers team up through our Demand Driven Development Program, we might be able to develop some nice migration tools that will make the transition even easier.