Blog: Craig Schiff: Free BPM: Open Source Comes to Performance Management

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Free BPM: Open Source Comes to Performance Management

Open source has been successful in the infrastructure and tools market. Pentaho brought the open source model to business intelligence which often forms the foundation for business performance management (BPM) solutions. Now a BPM applications vendor, Adaptive Planning, has taken it one step further - they are delivering an end to end BPM/BI solution stack using Pentaho's BI platform, data integration, reporting & analysis, and dashboards. Adaptive Planning will provide the domain specific performance applications such as planning, budgeting, and consolidation and pre-defined metrics. This solution also utilizes Oracle Database XE, Apache, and Linux. The end result is what I believe to be the first (but I'm sure it won't be the last) complete open source performance management solution. The goal is a more affordable, higher quality, community-driven solution. If successful, this can make performance management more accessible and bring its benefits to many more organizations, particularly in the mid-market. To that end there is even a free version (Express Edition) available for download. It is fully functional and can be used to meet a company's performance needs. This of course raises the question, how will Adaptive Planning make money? The answer is that they hope some percentage of Express Edition users will move to their Corporate and Enterprise editions which bundle in vendor support, a step-up feature set, and legal protections (such as indemnity) often required by larger companies for their mission critical applications. Whatever the outcome for Adaptive Planning from this initial foray by a BPM vendor into open source, end users will benefit by having a new cost -effective alternative. Other vendors may follow suit over time, if not with product than with new pricing models to address some of the price pressure this solution should bring to the BPM marketplace.

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