Getting There
Saturday, May 20th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
When we released version 4.0 of Intalio|BPMS back in February, one major feature was missing: a graphical schema to schema mapper. We had such a feature in previous versions of the product, but switching from BPML to BPEL turned out to be trickier than we had originally thought, and carrying the feature forward meant re-implementing it from scratch.
Well, the patience of our early adopter should be rewarded soon, for we just managed to make our new mapper work and generate executable code from user-intuitive mappings, as you can see on this screenshot. This new feature will be available with our upcoming 4.1.4 release, which should be made available early next week.
With it comes a host of new features as well, including a much improved WYSIWYG XForms designer and a packaging of the Intalio|Server runtime component with Apache Geronimo. Once this release is finally out, we will start working on JBoss integration, which was requested by many die-hard users of the Open Source application server. We expect such a feature to become available sometime in Q3 this year.
On the community front, bpms.intalio.com grew to 500 active users in less than two months following its semi-stealth launch. For comparison, it took more than a year and a half for Active Endpoints to grow a community of 400 active users between July 2004 and November 2005. Not bad for a start…
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0
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I’m curious…. Is there a technical reason why Intalio requires an Application Server like Geronimo or JBoss? I see a lot of products go the Tomcat+Spring route these days.
Ismael,
Congratulations to Intalio’s team for the good (and hard) work.
Regarding Intalio and the BPMS market, how far do you think you are from being able to compete head-to-head with other BPMS like Fuego or FileNet on industry analysts reviews like BPTrends BPM Suites Report (by Derek Miers and Paul Harmon) and BPMInstitute BPMS Report (by Bruce Silver)? I think that would bring you attention from a very broad audience.
Aditya,
We will offer both options. The application server is optional.
Luis,
From a product standpoint, we compete (and win) today.
From the standpoint of showing up on these reports, we would have to pay for it, and so far, we’ve felt that we could be successful without having to go down that path. It does not mean that we will never sponsor such reports, but right now I’d rather have customers talk about our product. In my view, real customer feedback posted on some blog will always carry more weight than any analyst report or press article.
Ismael,
I agree with you that customer public feedback and recommendations carry more weight than analysts reports. I think it brings you more solid opportunities than analysts reports, which will probably generate more RFP-like opportunities (very costly and less effective). But participation in the BPTrends report costs less that $5k, which seems to be a fair amount for the exposure a product can get.
Luis,
Fair enough. Do they offer a discount for Open Source vendors?
I don’t know, Ismael. I guess that never happened to them. Anyway, you may ask Celia Wolf (cwolf@bptrends.com) directly about that.
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