Imagine
Friday, November 14th 2008 | Ismael Ghalimi
Imagine a BPM tool that could be used by real business people. Imagine a tool that would allow them to document business processes using the simplest notation possible. Imagine a tool that would not only show pretty pictures, but actually turn them into executable processes, at the click of a button. Imagine a tool that could be used on demand, without having to install any software. Imagine a tool that would let business people automate highly-regulated processes such as the financials closing process, without any involvement from IT. Now, imagine such a tool being tightly integrated with the most advanced standards-based BPMS currently available on the market. Such a tool exists today, it has been developed by a little company based in Germany, and Intalio acquired this company today.
Before I tell you which company I’m talking about, I would like to give Intalio’s marketing team some time to finish our brand new website, and that’s going to take another week or two. In the meantime, I’ll let you guess which company it might be, and if you guess right by posting a comment to this article, I’ll send you one of these cool iPods designed by one of my friends (sorry, I can’t tell you who that is either). And because I’m getting a huge kick out of this guessing game, I’ll tell you more about the company we just acquired, its product, its customers, and why we decided to make such an acquisition.
Since its inception (nine years ago), Intalio’s strategy for bridging the business-IT divide has been a middle-out one: start from the process analyst, then reach out to the business leftward/upward, and to IT rightward/downward (Cf. article). Developing a standards-based, Zero-Code/One-Click-Deploy product for process analysts proved to be quite a challenge, but with the upcoming Intalio|BPP 6.0, I like to believe that we’ve pretty much reached this first milestone. Having done that, now is time to get software developers and business users involved as well.
As far as software developers are concerned, the early feedback we’ve received for the upcoming Intalio Developer Edition has been extremely positive, and I am confident that we are on the right track. But developing a product that could be used by true business users is quite another challenge. Of all the products we have seen so far, none let business users design non-trivial business processes that can be deployed without any involvement from IT. Either they generate skeletons of processes to which muscles must be added by technical people, or they’re too complex for real-world business people to really use them. Or so was the case until we came across this little GmbH, which I will refer to as The Company.
The Company’s product has been eight years in the making — good software is like good red wine, it takes time to fully develop. It’s a web-based process design tool coupled to a very lightweight process execution engine. The tool uses a notation so simple that any business user can understand it: boxes for activities, diamonds for conditional branchings, and arrows for transitions. And because the boxes have rounded corner, it could legitimately be considered as a primitive subset of BPMN. The process engine is a simple finite state machine built directly on top of a relational database, and tightly integrated with a BPEL engine (Apache ODE) for supporting more complex processes. It supports in-flight changes to process models, and such changes can be applied to any number of process instances, including individual ones, thereby supporting the execution of ad hoc processes. In other word, it’s quite flexible/forgiving, which is precisely what business users need. For workflow activities, the product integrates natively with the most popular task managers (instead of providing a dedicated one), including Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes (RTM coming soon).
The Company has sold this product to a dozen blue chip companies in Germany, including one of the largest insurance companies in the world, and one of the largest industrial equipment manufacturers in the world. These customers are using the product for a variety of business processes, ranging from new product development to money laundering detection. But one of the processes that really captured our imagination is the financials closing process. This process is owned by the CFO, usually managed by hundreds of employees working in the Finance Departments of large organizations, and is highly regulated by SOX and Basel II. For a couple of The Company’s customers, the process was designed and deployed by accountants directly, without any help from IT, and is being used for closing financial statements every quarter. Very cool stuff…
That’s all for now. More on it later. So, any guess as to which company we bought?
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0
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RunMyProcess
Mac,
Nice try, but that’s not it.
First, RunMyProcess is a French company, not German.
Second, while a great tool, it’s not for business analysts.
Best regards
-Ismael
IDS?
Thingamy? (Sig is German IIRC)
Jason,
IDS-Sheer has nice tools, but they can only be used by the most sophisticated business analysts. The tool we were looking for must be used by casual business users. Also, ARIS does not provide the ability to actually execute processes without using a third-party process engine like Oracle’s.
Best regards
-Ismael
John,
I love what Sig is doing, but Thingamy’s scope goes beyond processes, especially with respect to the data side of the story. As a result, his tool won’t be used by casual business users, who are the primary target for the tool we acquired.
Best regards
-Ismael
EMPRISE Process Management?
Ferry,
EMPRISE has a nice BPEL modeler, but this is definitely not a tool that a business person could use. It’s more targeted at the most sophisticated SOA architects out there.
Best regards
-Ismael
Ismael,
IDS — Just my silly English sense of humour.
I spent some time searching (even on Google.de — how sad is that?), but struck-out.
So I await in anticipation.
Best
-Jason
Jason,
I know, it’s a tough one…
One of the best-kept secrets in the industry.
A little bit like Intalio when I come to think about it…
Cheers!
-Ismael
Is it JCOM1?
D.
jPASS is a pretty cool tool, and very close to what needs to be done for business users from a notation standpoint. Unfortunately, it is not web-based, which is a requirement for mainstream adoption by business users.
-Ismael
Could it be inubit?
J.
Inubit is based on BPMN 1.1 and BPEL 2.0. It’s similar to Intalio’s original product, and targeted at process analysts, not casual business users.
Best regards
-Ismael
imatics?
Educated Guess:
iq-optimize
And the winner is…
Process square
Tammo,
imatics has a nice product, but still too technical.
I really like their ITIL process templates though.
Best regards
-Ismael
This is really fun, I just wish I could play…
Oh well, I already have two iPods…
These are exciting times.
Jannis,
IQ-optimize is pretty close to what’s needed in the space, yet too complicated for casual business users.
Best regards
-Ismael
Antoine,
Sorry, Intalio employees are not eligible…
-Ismael
I think the vendor is AristaSoft.
I think it is BPM-Xchange.
I would definitely say :
Process Square
Vishal,
AristaSoft seems to be out of business.
BMP-Xchange is a nice conversion tool, used by the company we acquired.
Best regards
-Ismael
Nicolas,
If you’re right, then Tatiana is right too, and she was first with this submission.
-Ismael
CIBER Novasoft!
Vishal,
CIBER Novasoft is publicly traded on NYSE.
A bit too big for us right now…
-Ismael
Collinor Software GmbH?
ConSol?
Eric,
Collinor is more akin to a Project Management tool.
ConSol is definitely too technical for business users.
Best regards
-Ismael
The cat is out of the bag. As two of you accurately guessed, the company we acquired is Process Square. If Tatiana will be kind enough to confirm her email address, she will get the iPod. If not, Nicolas will be the lucky winner. Congratulations to you both, and thank you for everyone else who helped me discover many new BPM vendors I had never heard about. This market is getting more and more crowded it seems…
More on the Process Square acquisition soon.
Best regards
-Ismael
[…] vendor that tried to sell themselves to Intalio—we’re on an aggressive M&A path, acquired a second company last week, and will make many more acquisitions in the coming 12 to […]
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