The Intalio BPMS Community Edition will be provided as an open source license, which will be amended slightly with a generic attribution provision that it submitted to the Open Source Initiative earlier this year.
Intalio’s BPMS suite includes an Eclipse process design tool based on the standard business processing modeling notation that generates and executes processes in line with the increasingly popular J2EE-compliant business process execution language (BPEL) and BPEL4People workflow framework that was devised by IBM Corp and SAP AG.
Redwood City, California-based Intalio recently crossed the 100 paying customer threshold, but claims over 5,000 companies use its open source software worldwide.
CEO Ismael Ghalimi said, in a statement, that open sourcing its entire BPMS suite will allow the company to accelerate its growth and garner more market share against its BPM rivals.
He said that users of the open source suite have the option to upgrade to the full Intalio BPMS Enterprise Edition through a yearly subscription plan and get access to support, patch updates, richer BPM features and indemnification.
A shift towards a full open source business model was not unexpected for privately-held Intalio. The company has been steadily releasing bits and pieces of its suite to open source. Last month is donated its process modeler software (BPMN Modeler) and Tempo workflow framework to the Eclipse Foundation and its BPEL engine to the Apache Software Foundation.
Other open source vendors welcomed Intalio’s move. We’re pleased to see industry-leading vendors such as Intalio move to an open source business … it will certainly help bring BPM to a mainstream audience, said John Roberts, CEO of open source CRM vendor SugarCRM.
Like Intalio, SugarCRM has also adopted the amended Mozilla Public License.
Future development of Intalio BPMS Community Edition will be now be driven by Intalio’s own open source community, which is hosted on www.intalio.org.
The first code release for Intalio BPMS Community Edition is expected in the first quarter of 2007.
Intalio has also pledged to increase its participation in other open source BPM projects it has donated code to, including the STP BPMN project hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, and the ODE BPEL project hosted by the Apache Software Foundation.
Intalio said the code created by both these projects will be fed back into Intalio BPMS Community Edition.
Intalio isn’t the only BPM vendor that’s embracing open source. Rival Tyco Inc has also made the latest version of its Eclipse-based Business Studio processing modeling tool available free of charge to the open source community.
