Thanks for your kind words.

We really believe in openness and candor.

More posts like these will tell the full story over time.

Best regards
 -Ismael

I’d like to thank you for sharing Intalio’s history, business model and vision with the community in a compact and still informative form. I thought until today that such a detailed description of corporate strategy and business choices belonged to closed analyst reports, and that the only way for an unaffiliated person to get to it was to analyze publicly available indirect sources.

Our CEO and I have had similar discussions, when confronted with similar choices. It was very interesting to read about problems, decisions, and their results on Intalio’s path to today’s success.

-Dennis

PS: We also used TIBCO GI (indeed, impressive stuff) in the first prototype of our web modeler.

We do not support their modifications, unless they give them to us and we agree to integrate them back into the core product, which more and more customers are doing. We did that with Avaya for example.
Best regards
 -Ismael

In reference to your statement in this post that ” … when customers subscribe to our Enterprise Edition, they get access to 100% of the product’s source code, with the right to modify it for internal use. While customers do not have the right to re-distribute the original source code, they do not have to give us their modifications either …”, how do you support a customer’s upgrade path on the core product if the customer modified the code and chose not to share it back?

Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated.

-Ismael

Although I don’t have the brainpower to be able to comment on how effective your business model will be long term, I must say that the focus you show, and the transparency of your operations is appealing.

I work for a company that could be considered a technology competitor, but probably safely separated from animosity through a more traditional business model. We have some similarities, based around the goals of our technology: deliver a seamlessly integrated platform for building differentiated enterprise applications more rapidly.

Perhaps you take a more process centric model, where we take a ‘repository’ centric approach (although a repository can be anything including a process engine for us). But the end result for customers wanting to deploy systems that will allow them to differentiate their operations from their competitors is a the same—with more than just a pretty process modeler and execution engine in the toolbox, an organization can really deploy applications that allow them to change and improve their business faster.

Keep up the good work and the insightful blog!

Phil

Thanks for the validation, very much appreciated.

I’ll reach out to other Commercial Open Source companies.

Let’s get the word out.

Best regards
 -Ismael

I can back you up on the sustainable business model of having the Enterprise Edition (as a subscription) with access to source code. It fosters freedom from vendor locking, and though the annual maintenance cost (including upgrades) remains competitive with proprietary systems, the TCO as an NPV is remarkably lower.

We’ve inculcated and weaved a similar model with Compiere, with tangible success. We don’t believe in crippling the Open Source Edition either, neither do we believe in offering every aspect of software for free (pure definition of Open Source), but we do believe in a sustainable profitable model that continues to foster innovation from the OEM standpoint (subscription license & maintenance revenue), and provides freedom from vendor locking from the customer’s standpoint (read full access to source code with distribution limitations).

Though this model may not apply to all industries and types of applications, it’s applicable to most enterprise applications. I’m sure this model will continue to evolve and tweaks will be necessary, but it is reasonably optimal for contemporary times. I’m reassured to learn about our synergistic thoughts on this issue.

Absolutely! As you might know, we’ve integrated Drools (aka JBoss Rules) into our platform and developed a very cool business rules editor for it in Eclipse. Next step is to add Drool’s CEP and ESP support.

-Ismael

Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated.

-Ismael

We are all very much looking forward to an exciting Japan User Conference.

With your crystal clear vision and strategy, and your seemingly inexhaustible energy and enthusiasm, you will make this endeavor a great success, and Intalio a great company. All along helping us all with your vision and efforts promoting Office 2.0 an Extreme Productivity.

Thank you and best wishes,

Ryan