Last year, my friend Bruce Silver wrote a very nice article on this blog discussing about Intalio’s new business model, and wondering why would anyone buy a BPMS when you could get one for free. Seven months later, here are some more details about our business model.

In a nutshell, we have inverted the traditional sales process for enterprise software. Instead of asking customers to pay for a perpetual license upfront, then selling them support services complemented by some training services and occasional consulting, we make our software available for free. You can download a complete BPMS including a BPMN process modeler, a BPEL process server, a BPEL4People workflow suite, and a BAM framework, entirely free of charge. And not only can you use it for development purposes, you can also deploy it into production, without having to pay us a dime.

Once you played with the software a little bit and got some coaching from our community members, you might decide that you would benefit from some formal training, especially after having read some of the feedback we got from customers who attended one of our regular classes.

After participating to such a training, customers usually do one of two things: either they send more people to training, or they subscribe to a support and maintenance plan. Today, this gives them access to our support engineers on a 24/7 basis. Down the road, they’ll also benefit from automated updates to our product, significantly simplifying the maintenance of complex BPM deployments.

Finally, our most demanding customers will want to upgrade to advanced versions of our product that support other databases than MySQL and provide load-balancing and failover capabilities. In such a case, they will be able to upgrade to Intalio|BPMS Enterprise Edition, which is licensed through yearly subscriptions in order to reduce upfront costs.

Along the way, we sell consulting services to Independent Software Vendors that want to embed our technology within their own products, while partnering with System Integrators for providing implementation services.

For customers, the benefits of such as model are multiple: lower upfront investment, reduced risk of adoption, and scalable deployment model. For us, the main advantage is in reducing barrier to adoption, thereby increasing market share without having to deploy significant sales and marketing resources.

Of course, this sales process inversion leads to increased deferred revenues, which mandates very strong financial discipline. As a result, customers should not be surprised that we allocate our limited resources in a very careful manner, and that they might have to pay consulting fees for spending time with us. But when they understand our model, they immediately realize the benefits they can gain from it, and usually go for it.

Welcome to the brave new world of enterprise software!