My friend Bruce Silver has a nice post describing Oracle’s BPM roadmap. From support for BPMN 2.0 and BPEL 2.0, to integration with a Process Portal and a Business Rules Engine, everything seems to be right on this picture, at the exception of one little detail: it won’t be available before a year. This is quite interesting, for Intalio’s stack is similar in most respects, but is available today, for free.

So let’s review the stack, and see how we compare:

Of course, there are a few areas where we differ. First and foremost, our business model. On one hand, Oracle offers development tools and development runtime free of charge, but the production runtime is sold through expensive perpetual licenses (budget at least $250,000 for a complete system). On the other end, Intalio|BPMS Community Edition is entirely free, for both development and production use. Intalio|BPMS Enterprise Edition is licensed through yearly subscription, which start at $15,000/Year.

Also, Intalio’s development tools are a lot more integrated that Oracle’s, mainly because they are built on top of Eclipse (vs. Oracle funky JDeveloper), and because we do not rely on a third party process modeling tool (IDS Scheer’s ARIS for Oracle). As a result, process models do not need to be exported from one tool and imported from another. Everything lives in the same tool, shares the same process meta-model, and is a lot easier to develop and maintain as a result.

Last but not least, Intalio|BPMS is available today. Oracle’s BPMS is not.

Aside from that, we like Oracle’s vision. Or is it Oracle who likes Intalio’s vision?

You decide.