Over the past few weeks, discussions started by the Why BPEL Matters article have gone from mildly engaged to radically passionate, bringing some clarity to otherwise arcane subjects. The need for standards was clarified, and Bruce Silver wrote one of the best analysis of the BPM marketplace I’ve seen in a long time. While I am thoroughly enjoying this debate, some bloggers are going from passionate to disrespectful, and this is a line I am not willing to cross.

In his latest article, Jean-Jacques Dubray, who describes himself as a SOA Enterprise Architect in a large financial institution, must be feeling the impact of the current financial crisis quite acutely, and went ballistic on myself and Intalio’s CTO, Assaf Arkin, for no apparent reasons, accusing us of being “by far the people that are the most responsible for the anemic state of BPM.” In my relatively short career (I am turning 35 tomorrow, and will have worked in the industry for less than 10 years), I have been accused of many things, but holding an entire industry back definitely tops the charts. Totally ego boosting, yet rather unrealistic.

As far as I can tell, Jean-Jacques is a pretty smart guy, and I cannot explain what triggered such an outburst of anger and animosity. Is it my ardent defense of BPEL? My profane invocation of Pi-Calculus to justify its benefits over alternative options? Or Intalio’s lack of interest for your whisper? I cannot tell. But if I did something that hurt you personally, Jean-Jacques, I will be happy to present my sincere apology to you, as long as you tell me the reason for your grief and stop calling me “greedy.” You see, I have no problem being called “stupid” as you did call me (my wife does it all the time), or ignorant about BPM and SOA as you implied (unlike you, I do not claim to be an expert), or even illiterate as you clearly stated (I prefer reading German philosophy rather than WS-* specifications, sorry), but “greedy” just does not cut it. And because you deserve my respect and consideration, I will tell you why.

As many BPM companies that started in the late 90’s or early 00’s, Intalio went through a painful yet necessary recapitalization. In most companies, recapitalizations were led by the management team and a new group of investors who crammed the previous investors down, artificially reducing a company’s amount of preferred stock outstanding, thereby keeping the management team motivated, and making it easier for the company to be sold to a prospective buyer. As newly re-appointed CEO, I managed such a recapitalization of Intalio in the Summer of 2006, but did it in a slightly different way. Instead of bringing a new investor on board (which I could have done), I convinced our existing investors to subscribe to an internal down round, to their pro-rata. All but one did, including those who had invested back in 1999. As a result, all investors preserved their pro-rata shares in the company. Should I have decided to raise money from new investors, these shares, which amounted to over two third of the company’s equity, would have been split between the new investors and the management team, myself included. Conclusion, the management team will make less money when we go public or get acquired, but we created a fair amount of goodwill along the way. Was that the best decision I made from a financial standpoint? Most likely not. Would I make the same decision again today? Most certainly. Am I stupid? You tell me. Am I greedy? I don’t think so, nor do my investors.

These things being clarified, please let me provide a couple of answers to your post.

First, on the topic of workflow. You seem to imply that we do not understand workflow, for BPEL does not offer constructs for workflow. To this, I will answer that human workflow is just a particular process pattern that BPEL can handle perfectly well, as long as it is complemented by specifications such as WS-HumanTask. Do I wish that WS-HumanTask were part of the standard BPEL specification in order to avoid any confusion? Absolutely! Is human workflow so unique a process that it deserves dedicated constructs at the BPEL level? I don’t think so. Does Intalio|BPP support human workflow out of the box? You bet it does.

Second, on the topic of BPM as a Service. The post you referred to is dated 02/26/2007, which makes it over 20 months old. While I stick to what I wrote back then, you might want to refresh your knowledge of the Intalio platform. First, all our server-side components are now available on demand, powered by Amazon EC2, and I’d be more than happy to provision an account for you free of charge if you would be so kind to take a look at it. Second, we did quite a bit of work in the area of multi-tenancy that you might find interesting as well. Third, you should not sell us short too fast, for we might be able to surprise you pretty soon, in a positive manner I hope.

Along these lines, I would like to share with you our very latest thinking in the fascinating area of BPM as a Service, and I would love to get your feedback on it, for I respect your opinion, even though I disagree with many of your conclusions.

First, I agree that an on-demand distribution model is a great way to foster adoption for BPM technologies, but so are Open Source and the Developer Edition that Intalio is currently building. When it comes to BPM as a Service, the primary reason why we like this distribution model is that it will help make BPM consumable by business people who do not have the skills nor the desire to install any piece of software on servers they do not have access to. Now, for such a model to work, one has to really understand the needs and skills of such business types, and this is an area where we might have to disagree I’m afraid — we could not agree on everything, could we?

As much as I like what the good folks at RunMyProcess have done, I do not think that such a tool is usable by nor appealing to business types, at least not the ones I hang out with. While there are many reasons for this, the most obvious one is the notation: whether you like it or not, BPMN is far too complicated for your average business users. It is designed for business analysts and process analysts, not for the many other people you’ll find on the business side of the house. For those, a far simpler notation must be used, and such a notation uses only three shapes: box (with or without rounded corners), diamond (for decisions), and arrows (for transitions). That’s it. And as much as I do not like to draw attention to my competitors, I must praise Lombardi’s efforts in this area with Blueprint, for it beautifully demonstrated what business users need. Too bad it’s just a process documentation tool that cannot actually run processes…

So, if I were to design a BPM as a Service offering, it would use such a dramatically simplified version of the BPMN specification (let’s call it Basic BPMN), and run processes by leveraging existing task list managers (Outlook, Notes, etc.) for human workflow tasks (that should make you happy). It would support the definition of arbitrary flows and loops in a non-transactional manner, support the embedding of Basic BPMN processes within end-to-end BPMN process maps made of multiple swimlanes, and provide integration with a full-fledge BPMN+BPEL platform in order to connect to a variety of third-party systems, both on demand and on premise, allowing (once again) business and IT people to see the process eye-to-eye from the very same tool.

That’s our vision for BPM as a Service, and I hope to show its realization to you at some point in the future. In the meantime, I would like to tell you that I sympathize with your situation (however difficult it might be), and hope that life will bring you whatever you think you deserve, for it’s too short to go through it all angry and mean.

PS: Even though we recapitalized the company back in 2006, we’re definitely not for sale.

PPS: Here are some lyrics from Stereolab (Double Rocker) that might bring you some joy:

Oui tu es le bonheur
Le morceau de beurre
Qui rend la vie si délicieuse

Ouvrir ton coeur, ouvrir mon coeur

Excuse-moi, j’ai tant résisté
Notre mirroir, m’a tant appeurée

C’est toi qui lui donne
Son goût profond

Ouvrir ton coeur, ouvrir mon coeur

La peur me quitte,
Je peux me livrer.
Je peux sentir et enfin t’aimer…

La chaleur monte dans l’abdomen,
Tu l’alimentes et le feu se réveille

J’étais de glace dans la glace, completement à la masse

Le feu crépite,
Il a trouvé les os
Les flammes s’agitent
Elles me redonnent force

La chaleur grandissante, m’a faite fondre, me délivre