Since we’re now officially in a recession, it’s time for everyone to revisit their plans. Some will gain, but most will lose, and some to be really affected by the downturn are enterprise software vendors selling expensive perpetual licenses for their products. The problem will get even worse for those selling expensive BPM software that can only be deployed by expensive consultants on the vendors’ payrolls. To those, I’d like to offer some advice, and maybe some help.

Most of Intalio’s self-described competitors in the BPM space are pure plays selling complete solutions to business buyers. Essentially, they go to the business side of the house, and ask which processes are broken. They pick a fairly simple one, quickly build a Proof of Concept (never showing all the code that goes behind the little boxes), and sell a mix of products and services that will hopefully fix the process, these services being almost always delivered by the vendor’s consultants. We do none of that at Intalio, having no consultants on our payroll, and giving all the implementation business away to our system integration partners. As a result, we do not really compete with these vendors, and this is why we’d like to help them out.

With the recession coming, IT budgets will be cut, and only the most critical projects are likely to be funded. Projects that require expensive software to be acquired and expensive consultants to be paid will be canned. Vendors relying on such projects will go out of business, unless they find ways to significantly reduce costs internally. They could do so by licensing a third-party process engine, and Intalio happens to have a fairly decent one that has been sold to over 12 OEM customers.

BPM vendors selling business solutions (Global 360, Lombardi, Pega, Savvion, etc.) all developed their own process engines 5 to 10 years ago, before BPEL came out. They kept making improvements to them, but not as fast as they should have. As a result, they end up today with largely obsolete technical stacks, that cannot accommodate the needs of customers who need support for the latest standards (BPMN 2.0, BPEL 2.0, WS-Whatever), high performance, massive scalability, cloud-based deployment, etc. As these vendors are moving up the stack toward what could be called a BPM application, it’s less and less clear why they should own the lower levels of the stack, the process server especially. It’s a bit like enterprise application vendors that developed client-server applications on top of a Relational Database Management System back in the 90’s. At the exception of Oracle who already had a database, none of them went on to develop (and maintain) their own database engine. The same should be true for BPM application vendors, and time has come for them to migrate to best-of-breed components offered by vendors that focus on the lower-levels of the stack.

Intalio|Server is the fastest, most scalable BPEL 2.0 engine currently available on the market. It’s been deployed on over 1,000 servers by some customers. It can support over 250,000,000 process instances running for multiple years on the same server. It has been used for processes that have over 250,000 steps. It can call a WSDL Web Service over SOAP and get a reply back within the context of a 2-phase-commit transaction in less than 14ms. It is tested and certified for 7 CPUs, 7 operating systems, 7 application servers, and 7 databases, across a QA matrix of over 350 combinations. It can be deployed on premise as regular software or as a virtual appliance, on a virtual server (VMware, Windows Virtual Server), or in the cloud (Amazon EC2 for example). It supports double bytes characters, has been localized in Japanese and Portuguese, and over 5 additional languages will be available soon. It’s the engine powering INFORMATICA’s newly released process-driven integration product, and it is being sold by NTT-Data INTRAMART to over 3,500 companies in Japan (more than 100 should go live with Intalio in the coming 10 months). Essentially, it works, and should address the needs of pretty much everyone on the market.

So here is my offer to my competitors: get in touch with our Vice President of Business Development (Robert Sepanloo, 650-596-1800), and ask him what it would take for you to replace your aging process server by our own. We’ll price it for a fraction of what you’re currently spending for maintaining yours, and our engineers will help you in the migration. That way, your engineers will be able to focus on your core application, which is the best thing you can do to best serve your customers in times like these.

Robert is waiting for your call.