Intalio’s news follows hot on the heels of Tibco’s announcement earlier this month that it has made the latest version of its Eclipse-based Business Studio business process modeling tool available free of charge.
Tibco said at the time of its own announcement that Business Studio is a fully functional, standards-based process modeling product for business users that supports the BPMN and XPDL modeling standards. While Tibco did not open-source the product, it went so far as to launch its own community that includes open forums, sample projects, tutorials, and documentation to help business users and analysts with their process modeling and simulations.
But Intalio has gone one further, because while the Tibco Business Studio is available free and is Eclipse-based, Intalio has open-sourced its business modeling tool and donated it to the Eclipse Foundation.
While some BPM vendors give their proprietary process modeling tool away, but charge for the necessary runtime components, we make our entire product available for free and give away the source code under Open Source licenses for its most critical components, said Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio CEO.
Intalio has made its business process modeling notation, BPMN, process modeler available under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and part of the SOA Tools Platform (STP) project.
The donation of our BPMN process modeler to the STP project will make this… tool a viable option to a growing community of business analysts, said Ghalimi, thereby contributing to bridge the gap that still exists between business and IT.
This latest donation is one of three contributions made by Intalio to open source BPM. It already donated its business process execution language, BPEL, Engine to the Apache Software Foundation and its Tempo BPEL4People workflow framework, hosted on Intalio.org. Together Intalio said the three components form the foundation for IntalioBPMS, its process management suite.
As well as from Tibco, competition in the free or open source business process modeling space comes from the likes of JBoss, whose jBPM is said to blend the best of both Java and declarative programming techniques.
Another open source tool, BPMN2BPEL, is said to translate process definitions represented in BPMN into BPEL. Meanwhie rival Savvion offers a Process Modeler, a component of Savvion BusinessManager, as a freely downloadable, stand-alone application (though not open source).
Intalio’s BPMN Modeler is available at http://www.eclipse.org/stp/bpmn/. The firm could not be contacted for additional comment before we went to press.
