As the BPMS is turning into the next RDBMS for building enterprise apps (Cf. recent post), many enterprise application vendors are looking at BPM to renovate their underlying platform. While they could build their own, now that industry standards have been set (BPMN + BPEL), licensing an existing one makes a lot more sense. Let’s take a look at how three industry leaders (INFORMATICA, Telcordia, and Coghead) are using Intalio do deliver best-in-class applications to their customers.

INFORMATICA is a leading provider of enterprise data integration software. As integration scenarios developed by their customers were becoming more and more complex, they wanted to develop the first process-driven data integration platform, and licensed the core Intalio platform (BPMN Designer, BPEL Server, BPEL4People Workflow Framework) back in December 2007. Intalio was not on their radar initially, and came in at the very last minute through an introduction made to their CEO by no other than Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com fame — thank you Marc! Following thorough due diligence and relatively tough negotiations, we finally came to an agreement, and started work on a very ambitious certification program for 7 CPUs, 7 operating systems, 7 application servers, and 7 databases, across a QA matrix of over 350 combinations. Intalio recently delivered its latest build, and INFORMATICA’s customers (over 3,300 at last count) should benefit from it very soon. Unparalleled support for industry standards — especially BPMN, BPEL, and WSDL — were primary selection criteria for INFORMATICA, alongside high-performance, scalability, and fault-toleance.

Telcordia is one of the world’s foremost providers of software and services for IP, wireline, wireless, and cable networks. Their OSS and BSS products are used by the largest telecommunication services providers around the world, and demand the highest levels of performance and reliability. When time came to replace a home-grown workflow engine, they looked for an off-the-shelf alternative based on industry standards — again, BPMN and BPEL came on top of the list. After evaluating most of the products currently available on the market, they selected Intalio. The work we did with Avaya to make our engine perform well in real-time, mission-critical environments was a key decision factor, as was the availability of source code for the entire product.

Last but not least, Coghead was our first major OEM customer, signed over two years ago. Coghead’s Platform-as-a-Service enables developers to build custom applications rapidly and create and manage SaaS businesses without writing a single line of code or investing heavily in hardware infrastructure. With a growing community of more than 40,000 members and partners, Coghead is fast becoming an alternative to expensive packaged software systems. Coghead 1.0 was built on top of one of our competitors’ BPEL engine, which relies on Java code generation for the execution of BPEL processes. As a result, it can only accomodate a limited number of process models deployed on the same server, and took up to 8 hours to start when hosting about 25,000 models. Coghead 2.0 is based on Intalio’s BPEL engine, which supports native BPEL execution, hence takes no more than 7 seconds to boot, even when handling over 100,000 different process models. Migration took less than a week (one of the benefits of BPEL, more on this on this recent post), and the system has been running smoothly ever since. It serves as an example of how Intalio can be used to power cloud-based applications.

We currently have about a dozen OEM customers, are signing a new one every month, and 41 software companies attended at least one of our training sessions over the past two years. Roughly a quarter of our overall revenue comes from software vendors, hence we’re taking this channel very seriously. So, if your infrastrcture needs an overhaul, or you’d like to reduce the cost of supporting your home-grown workflow engine, give our Vice President of Business Development a call (Robert Sepanloo, 650-596-1800).