New open source player in Business Process Management - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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February 25, 2008
New open source player in Business Process Management

Like New England weather, if you don't see what you expect, wait a minute.

When I was surveying for business process management (BPM) software with an open source software (OSS) development model and OSS Ts&Cs back in December 2007, efforts such as ActiveBPEL and Intalio that combined both were few and far between. Of course, Red Hat's jBPM and Sun's BPM efforts are also in the space as part of wider OSS efforts. The article that summarized my search for up and coming BPM players can be downloaded here by joining the ebizQ.net Gold Club.

General research said that BPM/EAI/integration software is among the most complex software developed and offered in the market. Therefore—conventional wisdom said—it is no place for the OSS culture and development model. Our findings disagreed and so apparently does a new entrant in the space, Colosa. Colosa announced February 25 that it was open sourcing its BPM package ProcessMaker.

In an email interview, CEO Brian Reale, CEO of Colosa, said he offers:
1.) an On Demand version which runs on their inhouse server cluster
2.) an OSS Version which can be downloaded for free and installed on Windows or Linux
3.) an Enterprise Version
The difference between the enterprise/On-Demand version and the OSS version is that the Enterprise Version comes with Support and some additional management features for Dashboards and Reporting.

Colosa, with South American roots and a U.S. office in Florida, is open sourcing its product according to Reale because it was built on the LAMP stack and users and partners were telling them that there are few BPM or Workflow tools available in PHP. (I have not had time to research that claim but if that's what partners were telling himI don't have to.)

Colosa is aiming its BPM/Workflow solution for the mid-sized company, and believes that OSS offers good distribution channel to reach the mid-sized company. Actually I have not seen that trend develop yet because OSS products typically require IT staff skills typically not found in the midmarket. But I expect that trend to develop and it does not hurt to be a little out ahead of the curve.

The real objective is to get Colosa's ProcessMaker workflow functionality into other ISVs products and you can't beat OSS for that purpose.

Colosa has been in business since October of 2000. However, initially it only produced specialized workflows for the Reinsurance Industry Vertical, according to Reale

So try it especially if you're an ISV looking for some workflow functionality. That's the advantage of OSS.