Interview: Intalio enables a process-managed enterprise 

Intalio, founded in July 1999, is set to go public with a trio of BPMS (business process management system) products that leverage customers’ best-of-breed applications while enabling a process-managed enterprise. Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer IsmaelGhalimi met with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Mark Jones to explain how the Intalio|n³ BPMS integrates into a company’s back-end applications and discuss the delicate subject of his co-opetition with SAP.

InfoWorld: Tell me about Intalio and what you’re doing.

Ghalimi: For the last three years [we have been] focusing on marketing communication [standards] with the idea to build an equivalent of SQL for business process management. We founded BPMI.org, for Business Process Management Initiative, two years ago and I am the chairman of that group, which now has about 200 paying members. We released the first version of our product to our early adopters and partners about a year ago, and our first two customers are now in production, including LexisNexis. So we feel that it is the right time to go public and announce the release of Intalio|n³ 2.0. It’s [our] coming-out-of-stealth mode and a fairly exciting time.

InfoWorld: The business process management space is pretty crowded. How do you differentiate yourself?

Ghalimi: What we are doing is a business process management system, which is a particular architecture for achieving business process management. The best way to define ourself is to take a look at the BPM market at large and to understand that it’s mostly made of players that come from the BI space and from the EAI space. Those products have very significant limitations, namely for the EAI products. They are usually limited to the messaging system that the vendors already own, so if you want to use Tibco’s BPM, you’ll have to use Tibco’s [messaging system]; if you want to use Vitria’s BPM, you have to use their messaging system.

InfoWorld: So standards have not been put in place then?

Ghalimi: Absolutely. We strongly believe that MQ Series plus a J2EE application server — be it WebSphere or WebLogic — is the standard that we need, so we built our business process management engine, our process server, on top of [that].

InfoWorld: Exactly where in the IT stack does your software run?

Ghalimi: Above the WebSphere or Web Logic application server and above the messaging system, which is optional. If you do not have a messaging system, then we can talk directly to the back-end applications because we have OEM’d connectors from Actional and Insevo. It runs on top of the app server for our process server, which is one of the three main components of our product. [We] have the design tool, Designer, which is used by both business analysts and software engineers to design and execute the whole process. [The Design tool] has a Windows look and feel to it, so you can run it on top of any operating system or workstation laptop. One of the main differences compared to other products in the BPM space is that with our product you do not have to write code.

InfoWorld: Will you be announcing Design as well as Intalio|n³?

Ghalimi: Yes. In fact [we have] three [announcements], product wise: The Design tool, the server running on top of the app server and the messaging system, and then what we call Director, which is a process portal framework that is mostly based on a new technology called XPage, which allows you to develop very interactive Web pages without having to juggle multiple languages. Today you’d have to [juggle] with JSP, Java Server Pages, plus HTML [and] XML because that’s how the data will come from the back end. We’ve aggregated all that to develop a WYSIWYG tool for building Web pages that’s called the Page Designer. This is going to come in Intalio 2.1, most likely at the end of Q1 or Q2. [It’s] very similar to Microsoft Front Page, but instead of generating static HTML it generates dynamic HTML.

InfoWorld: Is your target customer a business analyst as opposed to a developer?

Ghalimi: It’s really a mix of the two. We are not claiming that our environment could be used by business analysts only to implement a fully executable process that would be integrated within ERP. The idea is to have an environment that can allow the business analysts to specify the process and then the software engineers to just extend that process without having to write code. The customer for our product is really the CIO, who is more and more playing the role of bridging the gap between the business side and the [developer] side.

InfoWorld: How do you go about integrating that process into an enterprise’s back-end applications?

Ghalimi: We cover 145 packaged applications, either through the connectors that we [build] ourselves or through the connectors that we have OEM’d from Actional and Insevo. Typically, anything you could add in your back-end SAP [or] PeopleSoft, we connect to it directly. On top of that [we] dynamically expose all those APIs as Web services on the fly without you having to write code, both for standard APIs that would come [with] SAP, for example, as well as the custom ones. Everything that we touch from your back-end systems applications is automatically translated into a Web service that becomes a ready-to-use component that you can include in any kind of business process. On top of that, which is unique to Intalio, we have the ability to show the processes themselves that are in SAP, in Siebel, in PeopleSoft, in Oracle apps, as opposed to just the APIs. 

InfoWorld: What you’re describing gels with the idea that companies are looking for best-of-breed applications.

Ghalimi: Absolutely. Our model is for companies that have acquired multiple packaged applications. They standardized on, let’s say, WebLogic for the app server [and] MQ Series for the messaging system; that’s a perfect environment for our product to sit on top of and manage the end-to-end processes that do not exist in any of those packages and, in fact, should not exist. We are [about] valuated, best-in-class processes that [you] should not be able to find in any packaged application.

InfoWorld: Are you competing against SAP and their xApps architecture?

Ghalimi: It would be fair to say that SAP learned a lot from our architecture. SAP Ventures is an investor in our company, SAP was a very active participant in both BPMI.org and the development of WSCI [Web Services Choreography Interface], and they’ve just applied to become a member of the board of directors for BPMI.org.

InfoWorld: So even though you’ve been in stealth mode, SAP’s been mining your intelligence?

Ghalimi: To a large degree. What you find with SAP xApps [and] NetWeaver, which is really XI 1.0, and what you find with Siebel UAN [Universal Application Network] is very much an adaptation of our architecture model. From what we understand, SAP is not going to ship xApps — or I should say XI 2.0 — which is going to be their BPMS, for at least a couple of years. They started on XI [and] NetWeaver. Instead of buying best-of-breed technologies from a Tibco or a Web Methods for the process layer, Intalio, they decided to build everything from scratch and that takes time. That means that we have a fantastic window of opportunity. We have about two years to [focus on] talking to their customers.

InfoWorld: One of the recommendations analysts give to technologists who are evaluating these architectures is “Go with the ones that have the strongest partnerships.” Who are your partners?

Ghalimi: Our partnerships are [with] the leading process modeling tool vendors: IDS Scheer, Casewise, Popking, and Proforma. We also partner with the leading vendors of middleware systems, namely BEA and Tibco. [We’re] still in discussions with IBM; that one should come soon. And we partner with the consultant firms — currently we have a global alliance with CSC. In fact, they have decided to standardize on Intalio for every BPM project that they do.

InfoWorld: I noticed you didn’t mention Microsoft.

Ghalimi: We don’t mention Microsoft for several reasons. Our architecture is very much J2EE centric. Down the road we will be able to run on top of .Net when the Web service stack will consolidate and we’ll have all the services we need, not only WSDL but also WS Security and WS Transaction. Today we just interoperate with .Net through WSDL Web services. What’s interesting is that IBM and Microsoft in September released BPEL4WS, [which] is a major news for us because before that you had many different languages for processes — BPML [Business Process Modeling Language] being one of them, but you [also] had WSFL from IBM and XLang from Microsoft. Those two were very incompatible. So even though BPEL is not yet BPML, at least the two languages are very much the same and have the same mathematical model. The only difference is that BPML is a little bit more mature and has a couple of things that are still lacking in BPEL.

InfoWorld: Such as?

Ghalimi: Such as nested processes, [which] is the ability for a process to [close] itself at some point with all its context information, so you can have multiple vested processes that would share the same data. That’s very useful in many, many business scenarios and not found yet in BPEL. They say they will support vested processes down the road, so we are preempting that and inviting them to have a merge of the two specifications. At the end of the day, what we care about is for one standard to emerge. We believe in the necessity of having one standard so customers don’t have to make a choice.

InfoWorld: What is going to be the core value proposition of BPM?

Ghalimi: The question we would answer to is “What’s going to be the core value proposition of the BPMS?” One of them is support for a standard process modeling language. You don’t have support in most of the BPM products for any of those languages [and] that support is very, very important. The value proposition for the customer is, for example, I can use my existing process modeling tool, like IDS Scheer ARIS, and deploy my processes onto this kind of system. The second thing is not having to write code. If you take a look at the J2EE APIs or the Microsoft .Net APIs, it’s mind blowing how many APIs you have to [load] to do things with those. And then on the workflow side, what we are discovering more and more is that workflow systems are pretty much all incompatible with each other. … We have the ability with our product to consolidate all this workflow systems onto a single management system which is not only doing workflow but also business process integration and process information. That’s the value proposition on the workflow side.

On the application side, SAP announced that they are going [withdraw] support for four out of six releases of SAP R3 by the end of the year. So by the end of the year, 50 percent [of SAP’s customer base] will have to make the migration. … Our answer to that is, why don’t you use our BPMS to redo that customization at the process level as opposed to the application level? It’s much less expensive, because you can use our tools for doing that as opposed to writing code. Second, next time SAP comes back with such a deal, you don’t have to do that [migration] again because the customization was outside. That’s the killer app for BPMS itself: Abstraction from the packaged application, so that you are not kept hostage by the release cycle of those products.

InfoWorld: How would you measure the ROI for the migration of SAP?

Ghalimi: We still have to see what would be the cost of making the customization and enable of the process layer as opposed to SAP. We have very strong indication that it will be significantly less expensive. The ROI for the next upgrade would be very simple: You would just have to pay for the software. So when you say $15 million, that’s typically $3 million for the software license, and $12 for the system integration. When you have the next upgrade, you still have to pay $3 million for the software, and the system integration would go down from $12 [million] to $1 [million] or $2 [million]. That’s your ROI [on the] migration. That’s the kind of tactical return on investment you can expect when you use our product.