Following last week’s post regarding Intalio’s inverted sales process, industry analyst James McGovern came up with a set of thought provoking questions. I won’t copy his entire post — therefore I encourage you to read it first, but I’ll try to answer all his questions.

Why don’t analysts cover Intalio more?
Because we do not pay them anymore. Sorry, I could not resist… Yet, this is not far from the truth. We do not spend enough time with them, for we have very limited marketing resources. I am the one responsible for this, and I am trying to fix it, with an analyst roadshow to take place in September. During my seven years working for Intalio, I’ve learned that industry analysts won’t say much about you if you do not brief them first, in a proactive manner. Analysts from the private banking world do though. In fact, the best research seems to be made by bankers, which sort of makes sense when you think about it: what they research has a direct impact on their own money, not their customers’ money… Overall, I think analysts should be paid by customers, not vendors. This would add a lot more credibility to their work. But who am I to say that?

Will we integrate Intalio|BPMS with an Enterprise Portal?
It’s done already. the user interface components of Intalio|Workflow are already packaged as JSR 168 components. And we have a customer in Canada who is working on some integration with Liferay Enterprise Portal, which James referred to. We are also considering integration with content management systems such as Alfresco for example.

What should the Open Source community do to promote our sales process?
CEOs of Open Source companies already do that to a certain extent, and Marc Fleury is a good example for this. What’s missing is more metrics on what’s working, and what’s not, and clarification around the concept of downloads. Part of the problem is that the number of downloads seems to be the metric that Open Source companies are evaluated against. Personally, I think that the number of qualified registrations to a user community is a much more interesting way of sizing the user base for a commercial Open Source product, and serving as upstream feed into the sales process. Clarifying the terminology used to describe one’s community would benefit all involved.

How could BPM enable fine-grained entitlement?
This is an issue very dear to my heart. Four years ago, I introduced the idea of using the BPMS as ‘Process Firewall’, as illutrated on this partner website, which transcribes sections of our website circa 2002. The idea for a process firewall is pretty simple: model your process in BPMN using multiple swimlanes, one for each participant, be it a human being, an external system, or another process. The very action of breaking your process down into participants implicitely defines who can do what, which is also called authorization, or entitlement. Essentially, entitlement definition becomes a simple by-product of process design, and it’s one that comes out for free, with the right level of granularity. Back then, very few people understood the idea, but today it seems to be gaining a lot more acceptance. Timing is everything…

How many customers does a typical BPM vendor have?
Most pure-play BPM vendors will claim to have several hundred customers. Some traditional workflow vendors have thousands of customers. But if you’re looking for customers that have used BPM products themselvess without relying on the vendor’s own consulting services, I doubt that very many BPM vendors really have more than a handful of these, if any at all… And you’ll be hard-pressed to find these customers talking freely about their experience on the Internet. This is what we are trying to change. Customers, speak up, please!