Intalio Opens Its BPM Suite To Business Managers

Intalio has made its open source business process management suite friendlier to business managers for better collaboration with IT staff.

BPMS has been upgraded with support for standards geared toward making it easier for businesspeople to model processes that can be deployed by IT departments, Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio founder and chief executive, said Thursday. Changes in the new version include support for business process modeling notation (BPMN) within the suite's modeling tools, business process execution language (BPEL) in its server, and business process execution language for people (BPEL4People) in its workflow engine.

The standards shift makes the suite more accessible to businesspeople, who can model the processes for automation, and let IT build and deploy the application, Ghalimi said. "That's the whole idea behind BPM, bringing businesspeople and IT together to better manage business processes."

BPMN, developed by the Object Management Group, provides businesses with the ability to understand their internal business procedures in a graphical notation. Before adopting BPMN, Intalio used unified modeling language activity diagrams. "It's also a standard, but it's a standard for software engineers," Ghalimi said. "Businesspeople really couldn't use it."

BPEL is a business process modeling language that's executable, and BPEL4People is an extension of BPEL for adding workflow to applications. The international standards body OASIS is involved in the development of both specifications.

Intalio offers open-source and commercial versions of its BPM suite. The commercial version, called the Enterprise Edition, comes with support and maintenance, patch updates, and indemnification, which provides legal protection to customers against claims of patent infringement on Intalio software. In addition, the enterprise version includes clustering software for load balancing and failover; and connectors to business applications from SAP, Oracle and other vendors.

BPMS 5.0 is available now. Pricing for the Enterprise Edition starts at $15,000 a year.