Category: Research

We recently spoke with Intalio’s founder, Ismael Ghalimi, to get the scoop on open source BPM. The company moved to an open source code model in February 2006, and has spent the past year making the transition. This includes eliminating a direct sales force and focusing on organic growth, acquiring new customers through training programs instead of traditional sales force initiatives.
Intalio BPMS Community Edition is an Eclipse-based development environment used by business analysts and developers. It is available free from Intalio’s web site, www.intalio.com, and includes a BPM server and workflow capabilities.
Once a company downloads and starts using the product, and they have a clearly defined process they are automating, Intalio recommends they purchase a subscription to Intalio BPMS Enterprise, which offers patch updates, extra features, and other standard enterprise software license protection.
We were intrigued by the thought that Intalio has streamlined its operations and cut out the entire direct sales/marketing component to make itself a leaner company. Ghalimi explained that the main revenues are coming from customers that convert to the Enterprise subscription. In addition, Intalio makes money from people attending the training sessions that Intalio schedules around the globe to help new customers get up and running more quickly with their first process.
The results of Intalio’s efforts are encouraging. According to Ghalimi, the company has grown from 12 customers two years ago to 125 customers today, in 22 vertical markets and from 23 countries. All this essentially without a traditional sales force. 7,500 companies are using Intalio BPMS Community today. The goal is to convert them over time into subscription customers. To assist in this effort, Intalio has recently added a vice president position to head up its telesales operations.
On the operations side, the company is also going lean and efficient. It had outsourced engineering initially to the Ukraine and now is working with developers in China. Ten engineers remain at Intalio headquarters in California to architect the product and manage the development efforts. Similarly, technical support is outsourced to India, where the staff rotates every three months between QA and technical support to improve service to the customers. With all of this operational efficiency, Intalio hopes to be profitable by the later part of 2007, an good feat for a company that has made such a tremendous transition over the past year.
Apparently, gong organic can be good for you after all.

IBM Announced today the latest version of its Enterprise Content Management solution, IBM FileNet P8 4.0. The solution reflects the successful integration of FileNet following its acquisition in 2006. The capabilities that IBM has focused on for this release center around three main areas: content, process and compliance.
Compliance is King for IBM Customer Base
IBM has made a significant focus on records management and compliance as the major drivers for much of its customer base in 2006. With 23 of the top 25 banks and 24 of the top 25 insurance companies, it is understandable that for IBM, compliance and records management are at the top of the list for its product functionality build-out. Upside Research has not seen this deep focus on compliance across the broader range of BPM vendors, but believes it makes sense given the strong content focus for IBM’s and FileNet’s ECM solutions.
Dual product lines continue to evolve for 2007
One of the areas that IBM emphasized was to reassure its customers using existing IBM content management products and those using heritage FileNet products that both product lines would continue to be supported and evolved through 2007. The company’s message for its sales force to take to market is that it will enhance and maintain the IBM heritage Content Manager product, but at the same time, see if there was an opportunity for BPM in the customer account, and what User Interface would be most appropriate. Thus, customers can keep using what they have and plug more in as they need new functionality.
Operation Tango
The 1,200 developers that are dedicated to the Enterprise Content Management space have begun to work together, under a strategy called Tango, to find commonalities and overlaps and work toward complete integration of the two solutions into one integrated Enterprise Content Management platform by Q3 2008.
Agnostic Platform
Another commitment that IBM made was to continue to build out its support for all the other market leaders in databases, application servers, web servers, and user interfaces. The company claims 19% market share for ECM currently, and understands that if it wants to grow that to 30% it will have to support a wide range of other platforms and applications.

– First, a big event in 2006 was Oracle’s announcement of direct support for Linux, the same level of support it provides for its database, middleware and applications. By charging substantially less for Linux support than it’s partner, Red Hat, Oracle made a dramatic move that will affect how organizations purchase Linux.
– 2007 will be a big year for Open Source and Linux, with new Linux releases expected from Red Hat, Novell and other important Linux players.
– Linux will make greater penetration into the appliance market.
– Oracle will become an even more important Linux player. With Red Hat, Oracle pulled a Microsoft “we’ll love you to death??? approach, where it’s cozied up to them, obtained a strong relationship and build customer demand and then taken over and undercut its partner in delivering Linux support.
– However, a key remaining question is how little (or much) the Linux market may fragment as a result of this type of move by Oracle—as happened with Unix a decade ago, the pull exerted by individual vendors to serve their own interests, rather than the community’s interests, may eventually cause incompatibilities among different Linux varients.
– Linux on the desktop, as a replacement for Windows or Windows-applications, will continue to be a non-starter-even with (or perhaps, in spite) the roll out of Microsoft’s Vista Operating system and the next generation of applications.
– Open Source vs. Microsoft. Microsoft release of their new operating system will suck a lot of oxygen out of the room for the first half of the year. Most organizations will be too wound up in analyzing their opportunities or costs of upgrading to make Linux decisions. I do expect some companies to migrate to Linux after the evaluate the new Microsoft OS, but I believe that Microsoft will be offering a compelling combination of functionality and pricing that will not make the “move to Linux??? decision any easier.

– I believe that digital recording of television programming is going mainstream in 2007. As more and more people receive video-enabled iPods or Microsoft Zune portable audio/video players for the holidays this year, they’ll need digital content to put on those devices. Since (in most cases) it’s still difficult, if not illegal to put copy (or rip) your existing DVD movies into formats for these players at the moment, a great place fill up your devices is by using digital recorders (DVRs such as Tivo or media-enabled PCs) to record TV shows or movies and transfer them to your device.
– For many consumers, all-in-one devices such as Tivo (the traditional Tivo unit, or the new high definition one) is a great starting point. I believe that Tivo has one of the most intuitive and easy to use interfaces available for selecting and recording shows. Once set up, even grandma can use the peanut-shaped remote to easily record a single show or set up season passes to record all episodes of any show.
– More technology-minded consumers may want to consider a media-enabled PC, for recording TV shows directly to your computers hard drive or a networked server. This option is typically cheaper (no monthly service fees, such as with Tivo), but may require a bit more work to use.
– Many cable and satellite companies offer their own, integrated digital video records with their set top boxes. These are also good alternatives for non-tech savvy users, but they may be more difficult to use than an independent product like Tivo, with less intuitive menus or fewer options. However, some companies (such as DirectTV) offer the option of transferring recorded shows to portable media players, which make them great for people that want to take content with them on the go. Tivo also offers a great option called “TivoToGo??? that allows you (on the older/traditional Tivo units) to transfer recordings to laptop PCs and other devices.

Please consider joining us next week for a special Upside Research webinar on maximizing return on investment using business process management with SOA
Date: Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Time: 8:00 AM Pacific | 11:00 AM Eastern
Duration: 1 Hour
Register at: http://www.bulldogsolutions.net/IBMWebSphere/IBW09202006/index.aspx
Many businesses today are struggling to eliminate manual paper-based processes and progress toward more efficient workflows to automate and streamline everyday tasks. Business Process Management technology can help your organization improve overall capabilities, resulting in lowered costs and an increase in competitive advantage. BPM solutions not only allow you to automate processes by making them more efficient and less expensive, they also provide visibility into your business to help you capitalize on market opportunities.
In this complimentary Webcast, David A. Kelly of Upside Research and Stephanie Wilkinson of IBM WebSphere will analyze three characteristics of high ROI BPM projects, based on discussions with industry executives and interviews with organizations that have deployed BPM products. They will also highlight the types of solutions that can help your organization maximize the benefits of BPM.
You will learn how to:
– Identify and prioritize projects that can deliver high payback
– Enable collaboration to drive process improvement initiatives
– Discern BPM products that can help maximize productivity (Modeling, Monitoring)
– Align business and IT goals so that process improvements serve strategy
– Incorporate SOA into your BPM strategy
To sign up, visit:
http://www.bulldogsolutions.net/IBMWebSphere/IBW09202006/index.aspx