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BPM is too good a technology for it to be kept out of reach from most potential users because of prohibitive licensing costs. Until now, a fully featured enterprise-class BPMS would cost well north of $250,000. If you wanted to add support for a Business Rules Engine (BRE) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), the tab would go as high as $500,000. Such a high price tag is probably the largest single contributor to the relatively slow adoption rate for BPM that was witnessed by analysts and vendors over the past five years. Hybrid business models blending open-source and commercial software allows projects to be started right away, while ensuring that customers are supported over the long run. In the end, customers, system integrators, and software vendors alike will all benefit from the upcoming explosion of the BPM market. Things are starting to get exciting, so don’t wait any longer and join the party today!

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Online Community

Every month, thousands of new organizations are introduced to Intalio|BPM through our Community Edition. Our highly participative community is a perfect place to find code samples and tutorials, or ask questions to experts to help you get started. You can find Intalio customers and our own Process Experts on the forums at all hours of the day. We encourage all of our 50,000 user organizations to participate, either by asking questions, or by providing answers and suggestions.

Industry Standards

BPMN and BPEL today make up the most widely used standards in the industry.

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
BPMN provides a standardized way of describing a business process. The notation allows for collaboration between business users and IT professionals (common language). BPMN follows the tradition of flowcharting notations for readability, yet still provides a mapping to executable constructs. With Intalio|BPM, you can use BPMN to model both the orchestration of web services and the execution of human workflow tasks, while enabling the choreography of multiple business processes through the swimlane metaphor. The industry standards supported within Intalio|BPM work together, as one can go from modelling in BPMN to automation using the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), without ever having to write any code. One standard without the other means that only half of the problem is solved. BPMN's support for compensating transactions, unsolicited events, complex loops, and multiple swimlanes is what makes it unique, effective and irreplaceable. Direct transaction to BPEL is what makes it truly useful.

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)
BPM products from leading vendors such as IBM and Oracle all use BPEL for process execution today. Following hard fought battles, BPEL won the war of standards, and the industry at large is in a much better position for it. The BPEL 2.0 specification allows users to deploy mission-critical processes on a reliable platform. Intalio|BPM works because of BPEL, much like relational databases work because of SQL. Most developers and business process analysts don't really have to pay attention to it, for they won't have to write a single line of BPEL code if they pick the right tool. But BPEL is like the DNA of your process, it is the standard used to make sure that your process runs as it should, and there should be no reason why you should settle for anything less.

Interpreting BPEL Code Natively
Early implementations of the BPEL and BPML specifications relied on Java code generation: you write the code in BPEL, and a code generator automatically translate it into a set of Java classes that are deployed on a Java Virtual Machine or a J2EE Application Server. Good news: it’s a relatively easy way for a vendor to get into the BPEL game. Bad news: it does not really work. Much like Oracle's database does not generate C code to execute a given SQL query, a good BPMS should not have to generate Java classes to execute a BPEL process. Java code generation is bad because it makes the deployment of processes more complex than it should be, creates discontinuity from the process semantic that makes debugging and monitoring an order of magnitude more difficult than with native interpretation, and ultimately, slows everything down. Things get even worse when such implementations rely on the EJB component model for the persistence of process data, especially when Entity Beans with Container-Managed Persistence are being used. One of our customers, the Dutch Government, is running 250 million concurrent process instances that can take up to five years to complete on nothing more than a 4-CPU box. If you need performance and scalability, interpreting BPEL code natively is the only option.

Zero Code

BPMN and BPEL make for an extremely powerful combination because they allow one to go from a graphical model to code without having to actually write the code. Let’s face it, a lot of work went into the development of these two specifications, and this work benefited from an unprecedented amount of collective experience that no single vendor could ever match on its own. This means that most BPM products that are based on proprietary notations and execution languages actually require the writing of code in order to make processes executable. Double click on the neat-looking boxes and arrows, and code written in Java or proprietary languages will show its face. There is nothing fundamentally wrong about code, but it just so happens that writing and maintaining code is harder and more expensive than writing and maintaining none at all. Intalio|BPM makes it possible to implement the most complex processes without having to write code. The same customer, the Dutch Government, did just that for a process that has a quarter of a million activities, so if it worked for them at such a scale, it should work for your organization as well.

One Click Deploy

By their very nature, business processes are prone to change, and most of us got interested by this new BPM thingy because of the promise that it would make change a little bit easier. There was even an early pure play BPM startup using the tagline "Go ahead! Change!" to emphasize that very point. Well, this is all nice and fancy, but if one has to write multiple deployment descriptor files and configure various web service interfaces to deploy a process, the ability to change the process as you go remains a pipe dream. Intalio|BPMS implements a radical One-Click-Deploy approach to solve this problem. Once your process is valid, with all data mappings completed, business rules defined, and workflow parameters set, just click on a button and get the process deployed on your runtime environment, without any additional work. There is absolutely no reason why it should be any more complex than that.

Dynamic Process Optimization

Adepts of the Business Process Reengineering school promoted the concept of continuous process improvement, and early BPM vendors made sure to support this methodology with their products. Problem was, changing the process once deployed into production turned out to be more difficult than most had initially expected, especially when software code had to be re-written for changes to be applied. Furthermore, if making a change to a process meant going through the entire process lifecycle all over again, from modeling to simulation and deployment, most ideas for process improvements remained just that, ideas. Intalio|BPM marks a departure from the concept of continuous process improvement, and promotes a more dynamic process optimization model, whereby key process elements can be optimized on the fly, without having to re-deploy the entire process. Through the use of native BPEL interpretation, reusable process interfaces, externalized business rules, late-stage binding, and instance-level exception handling, running process instances can be optimized in real time, without requiring advanced technical skills. Such an approach allows one of the largest municipalities in Norway, Baerum Kommune, to make regular changes to long running processes. If anyone had any doubts that BPM could be used to support long-running transactions, such doubts should be put to rest by now.