Intalio|Works

Please contact oem@intalio.com for more information about our OEM program.

Embedding a BPM Engine

In embedding a BPM engine into your application, the temptation is great to build it yourself. But today, with the adoption of well-established standards for BPM, and the availability of commercially-supported open-source platforms, there is absolutely no reason why you should reinvent the process wheel.

Standards Have Been Set

Microsoft's recent decision to finally adopt BPEL 2.0 for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) established BPEL as the clear winner in process execution standards. Any BPM product that is not natively architected around BPEL is a risky proposition. On the notation side, BPMN really is the only game in town. Intalio|Works is the only open source product with support for both BPMN and BPEL. Furthermore, Intalio|Works supports any version of BPEL (1.0, 1.1, and 2.0), as well as migration from XPDL and various proprietary process execution languages.

Embedding is Easy

Next-generation BPM products such as Intalio|Works have been designed from the ground up to be embedded within larger products. They are built on top of the standard J2EE stack, provide all the components you need out of the box (Application Server, ESB, Portal, etc.), and have a modular architecture where components can be easily replaced by others, thanks to the use of standard languages and APIs. The design tool deploys standard BPEL processes onto the process runtime, which itself communicates with the workflow framework though web service interfaces. Java APIs and web service interfaces are offered by the process runtime for administration purposes, connectors to third-party systems — your own application included — are developed using standard APIs, such as JBI and JCA, and the workflow framework can be used with its own user interface, or any user interface you might already have.

Performance is Stellar

For quite some time, using a BPM system meant taking a significant performance hit, especially when compared to the use of straight Java development. Things have changed since the early days when BPEL was spelled BPML, and today, the fastest BPM products can rival with any alternative technology you could throw at the problem. Here are some numbers collected with Intalio|Works Server:

Largest number of individual process activities modeled: 250,000
Largest number of process models deployed: 100,000
Largest number of concurrently running process instances: 250,000,000
Largest number of individual end-users per day: 100,000
Largest number of servers in clustered deployment: 1,000
Largest number of in-memory transactions per day and per CPU: 14,300,000
Largest number of persistent transactions per day and per CPU: 3,600,000
Roundtrip call to a WSDL web service from a BPEL process: 14 milliseconds

No other product comes even close.

Source Code is Available

A BPMS should be viewed as an open platform, not a closed application, and as such, getting access to source code can quickly become very useful. One of the reasons why the development of meaningful industry standards in the workflow space ended up in failure is that there are very many different ways of doing workflow, and vendors could not really agree with one another. As a result, the next generation of vendors decided to tackle the problem at a lower level, came up with a generic language capable of executing virtually any kind of process (BPML, later replaced by BPEL), and developed frameworks that would allow customers — end-users and software vendors alike — to develop any workflow pattern, without having to reinvent the wheel each time they would come up with a new one. BPEL4People is one such pattern, but there are countless others that are worth using within the context of specific busiess scenarios, and using an open-source BPMS that supports workflow as a collection of customizable processes certainly is the easiest way of supporting them all.

Prices Went Down

If you are a software vendor, or the developer of a web 2.0 application, there is only one way you should look at the problem when it comes to cost: how many developers will you need to hire and train in order to develop and maintain your own workflow or BPM solution from scratch, or even from existing open-source pieces? If the answer is more than one, and they happen to live in expensive places such as the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, TX, or any major European city, going the OEM way and working with a commercial open-source company such as Intalio will save you money. If you also include the risk that your team could be late in delivering its super-duper workflow engine from the sky, the decision should quickly become a no-brainer.

Others Have Been There Before You, Successfully

As of today, Intalio is working with more than 20 software vendors that are embedding Intalio|Works within their own products. Packaging and documentation are becoming better by the day, and bugs are fixed faster than we could if we were to work only with end-users. Our software is being used by more organizations than any other BPM vendor's software today, and it’s the only one that is available under an open-source license, while supporting both BPMN and BPEL. So, if you're looking to add BPM or workflow capabilities to your product, or if you would like to replace some piece of legacy code you do not care to maintain yourself anymore, make sure to give us a buzz.