Blog: James Taylor

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June 30, 2008

Book Review by Ade McCormack

Ade McCormack, author of The IT Value Stack (reviewed previously) and columnist at the FT in England, just reviewed the book for this blog. You can read his review of Smart (Enough) Systems over on his blog.

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First Look - Corticon

I got a walkthrough of Corticon’s Business Rules product last week - the first time I have discussed it in a while. Version 5 has some interesting features. The Business Rules Foundation is a set of headless services, designed to support a variety of development tools, UI frameworks and metaphors along with a variety of persistence mechanisms. On top of this Corticon ships its own Rule Studio, built in Eclipse, and IDS Scheer ships its ARIS Rule Designer (allowing rules to be specified in parallel with process models and stored together in a single repository). The core engine uses code generation, currently to Java or .Net . Finally there is a data integration layer to integrate external data so that it can be accessed as needed by rules as they execute rather than having to be marshaled for a call to a decision service.

The tool is aimed at less technical users and this is something Corticon certainly works on. I have my doubts about Eclipse as a business-friendly tool but Corticon does offer a fat client version that is more streamlined. Users define a vocabulary (either from scratch or by importing XMI, UML, XSD or Java interfaces) and then specify constraints on attributes, map that to the inbound data or to external data sources and define rules against the vocabulary. Rules are defined in rule sheets (similar to what most vendors call rule sets) and these are linked together into ruleflows - what I might call a decision flow. The rule sheets are designed to make it easy to define the values different attributes must have for a rule to be true (using a table metaphor) and can then be linked to rule statements (something like reason codes) with a rich set of meta data related to outcomes. Corticon’s approach is sometimes called a Decision Table but there approach is different than mot others - less compact but able to define more complex rule logic in the table. Rule conditions trigger actions, such as setting attributes to specific values. The ruleflow allows sequencing of these rule sets as well as some iteration and branching – the iteration seems mostly needed to compensate for the lack of a Rete engine to automatically re-fire rules but could also be used to iterate more generally.

Validating that rules are complete and consistent has always been something Corticon has handled well. While a number of the vendors have closed the gap recently, the table metaphor Corticon uses works in their favor here and this remains a strong feature. They have added some nice testing facilities, allowing input, output and expected data to be compared. This kind of support for regression testing has become widespread in the rules industry in recent years and it is nice to see it here also.

Corticon prides itself on being “model driven” and on not needing much programming support. One area this shows up is in the data connectors which do not require any SQL writing, for instance, instead generating it from the model (vocabulary) and database schema. Obviously this is easier for non-technical users but it does mean that specific stored procedures or SQL could not be used to access a database and this could be a little limiting.

Corticon has also started expanding into application frameworks with one aimed at automated customer acquisition (primarily in Insurance).

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June 27, 2008

First Look - Visual Numerics

Visual Numerics is a 100 person, privately held company that’s been around for a while - nearly 40 years - and yet is largely under the radar thanks to the size of other “analytics” companies. As the business world moves from BI to analytics it is sometimes finding that BI tools are really focused on reporting and OLAP. VNI offers embeddable libraries for advanced math and visualization. Its focus on embedding, rather than on being an application, is not unique among analytics companies but it is not common either.

VNI offers a wide range of algorithms and one of its key value propositions is supporting multiple platforms and languages. Their routines work everywhere, and work the same everywhere, which can be a big deal for customers. In particular, they offer common routines for customers seeking both Java and .Net/C# options. They help companies get a faster time to market for analytics, offer platform consistency, deliver efficient algorithms and can offer execution at source e.g. in database.

VNI has been focused in science and research historically but now more and more business focused including both direct customers such as Humana and OEMs such as SAP and Teradata. Historically lots of work in flight testing, space, pollution, oil and gas, weather forecast etc. Now they do more “normal” predictive analytics and optimization. Today they say they are often finding customers who have used “first generation” capabilities and now need to move to newer and more powerful (or more specific) techniques e.g. in forecasting. VNI’s willingness to do consulting to build custom algorithms, visualization applications and other software  etc is part of their pitch. Example applications include product supply optimization, portfolio analysis, visualization, forecasting, network traffic and other similar high performance analytic scenarios.

Their OEM business is clearly their current focus, and their embeddability is going to be a big advantage there. For instance:

• Teradata is embedding the C based analytics in the database engine to offer in database analytics as user defined functions (see below)
• NextSigma is using their .NET algorithms for Monte Carlo simulations in support of Six Sigma
• Acision, a company providing mobile messaging infrastructure, is  developing a new application based on their algorithms to show deliver marketing analytics derived from the text message traffic to their telco customers
• SAP Netweaver is using their code to improve text search (initially).

They offer two main products - IMSL numerical libraries and PV WAVE visual data analysis. Their Java and .Net products are adding 2D/3D charting linked to the algorithms and overall data mining, predictive analytics, optimization and simulation are the focus areas going forward.

VNI clearly competes at some level with the likes of SAS and SPSS but VNI aims to offer algorithms that are more embeddable and more cross-platform without the overhead of a complete application. They also compete with some of the easier to embed analytic application products like KXEN or Matlab but seem to offer a broader array of algorithms as well as a smaller footprint.

Teradata, a Visual Numerics customer, recently announced the availability of Warehouse Miner 5.2. This offers data mining functions embedded in the Teradata database. A major component of Warehouse Miner 5.2 is the Teradata Statistical Library- a collection of functions based on Visual Numerics’ IMSL Libraries . With Warehouse miner users can run data mining functions against detailed data in the warehouse without manually coding or moving data between systems.

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First Look - OutSystems Agile Platform

OutSystems came to my attention at the Forrester IT Forum as they were suggested as a tool with good support for what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Founded in 2001 they have 100+ customers mostly in Portugal and the Netherlands but increasingly also in the US. Of these they identify 17 existing customers that have a “software factory” built around OutSystems’ Agile method and platform.

OutSystems’ focus is on web business solutions with fast time to market for custom applications that are adaptable, controlled and manageable. They focus on reducing the TCO of custom systems and on change-centric markets. Half their customers are SAP shops and most are building composite applications. They like to differentiate between the stable business elements (well supported by existing ERP, CRM and custom applications) and fast, continuous business change where customers need rapid development and change of a composite application based on the web. Five key areas are supported by the product called the Agile Platform:

• Integrate - An Integration Studio allows you to make code or legacy systems into services consumable by the rest of the OutSystems platform. It supports introspection for existing services etc.
• Assemble - Service Studio is a visual IDE for laying out business logic, flow, data structures, calls to services etc
• Deploy - Service Studio and Service Center are used to define where an application will run, to deploy it and to do QA (error and code checking, generation, compilation and deployment).
• Manage - Agile Manager and Sizing and Scoping tools allow you to log, and monitor deployed applications and their consumed services.  In addition Agile project management capabilities are built into the platform.
• Change - the system allows you to capture user feedback from the running application (with their Embedded Change Technology) - users click on a hotspot to get a pop up window where they can say what’s change is required - and this feedback is captured as a screen shot and then managed as part of the ongoing Agile project management capability.

Within the Assemble piece they support if-then-else, calls to code, iteration etc. There is not much business process support and no support for declarative decision services (except in so far as you could integrate any decision service built with a Business Rules Management System). The environment is designed to be collaborative and is model driven allowing a certain amount of self healing as things are changed.

It’s an interesting development tool - reminds me somewhat of what CASE tools SHOULD have been when I worked on them back in the late 80s/early 90s. I do think that to be a platform for dynamic business applications they need to provide some tools that allow business users to collaborate more easily around decisions and processes and I am lookin forward to see what they do.

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June 26, 2008

How to address decision making challenges - optimism

Optimism in one characteristic that it might see harsh to criticize. But take a look at this article on Accounting for the future. It makes a couple of interesting points. Firstly that the preparation of projections can be misleading and that an “inside view” - caused by developing a detailed plan, say - makes you more optimistic because you are less focused on outside events. People, it seems, are better at being optimistic and more data, more time to do analysis can make this worse, not better.

One could imagine that this would create problems with staff and customers being overly optimistic about when they might complete something (handling a refund, say), when they might be able to afford something (like paying off a debt), how likely they are to remember something (like a prescription). Rather than giving them information and hoping they make a good (and not too optimistic) decision, we could automate the decision and do so in a way that uses the data pragmatically. These decisions would then not be optimistic but realistic.

Of course one can be guilty of optimism hen designing decision management systems but I think this would be easier to control as it happens less often and in a more controlled environment.

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4 more days to get a FREE iTouch

Remember the 1st Enterprise Decision Management Summit and the 11th International Business Rules Forum ? October 26-30, 2008 at the Buena Vista Palace, Orlando FL. Don’t forget that as a reader of this blog we are able to offer you a special, one-time offer as an honorary member of the Friends and Family of the EDM Summit/Business Rules Forum.

Until June 30, your EDM Summit/Business Rules Forum registration includes your very own iTouch! All you have to do is register by June 30 - just 4 days away, and enter iTouch08 as the promotional code. Registration must be fully paid by July 31, 2008. Complimentary registrations are not eligible for this offer.

There is no limited quantity. You don’t have to win it. The iTouch is yours FREE, if you register by June 30. Ready to claim your iTouch?

This is the first time we have run the EDM Summit and we have a great set of speakers on EDM covering rules, decision management, analytics, data mining and more. The Business Rules Forum continues its history of providing great content on business rules and the good news is that one fee gets you into both.

The technologies and approaches of EDM are increasingly essential both to companies maximizing their investment in business rules, and those focused on using other technologies to develop composite and dynamic business applications.

The Program Schedule offering 60+ rich, in-depth sessions on business rules, enterprise decisioning and related technologies. Major corporations and government agencies speaking this year include Bank of America, Chubb & Sons, Circuit City, Dell, Discover, Fannie Mae, Hartford, IRS, Kemper, KeyBank, Liberty Mutual, Revenue Canada, Sun Microsystems, U.S. Navy, Walt Disney, Wells Fargo, and many more!

There’s lots more information on the web:

• 2008 Schedule
• 2008 List of Speakers and Companies Presenting
• 2008 Session Abstracts and Speaker Bios
• 2008 Vendors at the Product Expo

“I have concluded that decision making and the techniques and technologies to support and automate it will be the next competitive battleground for organizations. Those who are using business rules, data mining, analytics and optimization today are the shock troops of this next wave of business innovation”
Tom Davenport, Author of Competing on Analytics, who is giving a video keynote at this year’s event.

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Event processing and decisioning are complementary

My old friend Paul Vincent had an interesting post on Complex Event Processing - Aberdeen on Predictive Analytics & BI => CEP - in which he talked about some of the drivers for BI sounding a lot like complex event processing drivers/scenarios.

There is certainly event correlation in these examples but there is also a need to decide effectively - not just to process the event but to decide how to act appropriately. While you could bundle that in with CEP, many decisions (such as what makes a good cross-sell for this customer) might also be used in process-centric situations as well as event-centric ones. Externalizing and managing these decisions as distinct assets would therefore make sense.

I was going to post it as a comment but the Tibco blog apparently can’t add up and thinks that 5 + 10 <> 15.

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June 24, 2008

How to address decision making challenges - ownership

I was settling down to write some more on the issue of how to deal with various kinds of decision making problem when I remembered that I, and my friends at Big Sky Thinking, had dealt with this before. Check out this post on decision making traps and this one on whether or not experts do better than software (they don’t). Anyway, this eliminated a number of ideas for today’s post <sigh>.

Ownership of decisions, however, is another very real challenge. Who owns the decision to refund a fee or to accept a return without a receipt? Who owns the decision to make an expensive offer to retain this customer but not that one? Most organizations have some idea who they think should own these decisions. However, in many cases, the person who actually owns the decision is:

• The person who delivers it (customer service representative, store clerk)
• The person who programmed the system or website
• Someone who works for a partner or channel organization who happens to be the interface to the customer
• The marketing team that sent out the mailer or designed the print ad that includes the details of an offer

You get the picture - if you are not careful, decisions can be made by unexpected people. Let’s take a concrete example. The personal assistant to one of your most valuable customers calls your call center to complain about a fee. Who do you want deciding whether to refund the fee (and potentially keep the customer) or not? Do you want it to be the brand new call center representative who started today? Perhaps the outsourced contract developer who built the refund module? Maybe the overstretched supervisor for the call center who is having a bad day?

Actually, of course, you don’t want any of these people to make the decision. You want to manage the decision so that the value of the customer, their retention risk and more is considered and so that the person who REALLY made the decision was the person who works on how to handle the best customers. Only taking control of decisions, being explicit about how they are made and using automation to deliver the decision in every channel, every time is really going to work. Enterprise Decision Management, in other words.

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Are programmers the problem?

There was more discussion in the blogosphere about the James McGovern COBOL is Evil post - COBOL is not evil, but COBOL programmers are. Now I already posted a response to James’ post (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful - not Java) but this new post made me think. I should say that not only are some of my best friends programmers but that I have been a programmer, development manager, product manager, architect and methodology author in my career so please don’t consider this some marketing guy whining about programmers!

Some time ago Bjarne Stroustrup was interviewed in “The problem with programming” and he made some good points. I think the problem is not with programming languages per se but with the idea that programmers should be responsible for coding the behavior of the business, it’s business logic or decisions, in the first place. Not so much that COBOL programmers are evil - all programmers (of a certain mindset) are evil.

How can we expect a programmer to be both an expert in programming (with all the architectural, design, language and technology skills that implies) and an expert in the business? Clearly we cannot. If we are to build systems that work the way the business needs them to then those who understand the business will have to take a real role in the development of information systems. Otherwise programmers will build what they think is needed and then “sort of evolve” it into something that works. But programmers and those who understand the business have a fundamental difference in perspectives. Unlike Bjarne I don’t think that allowing programmers to express “real-world ideas succinctly and affordably” is what makes a language useful, at least not when those real-world ideas are things like “follow the state regulations when approving loans”.

Bjarne’s brief definition of a good system is “correct, maintainable, and adequately fast” and it’s a good definition. It must be noted, though, that “correct” and “maintainable” go together in the sense that code that starts off correct but is not maintainable will rapidly be incorrect. As this kind of change is inevitable systems should be designed, and languages selected, to focus on this maintainability. This focus on maintainability is one of the reasons why business rules can be better than other coding styles. When correctness must be described in business terms, rather than technical ones, then you need languages that enabled what Forrester calls”Collaborative Business Engineering” - an approach where the business and the programmers are working jointly on solving a problem and keeping that solution current rather than the business throwing it over the wall to the programmers. Now there are those that say that requirements are the problem - if we could just get the users to get them right we could build the right system. Personally I call this the requirements tarpit and have written before as to why requirements show the problem but aren’t the problem.

Anyway, one of Bjarne’s solutions is to “use more appropriate design methods, and design for flexibility and for the long haul”. I could not agree more and think the evidence that business rules and business rules management systems can address this is compelling. Don’t let your programmers write business logic, make your business users do it!

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June 23, 2008

How to address decision making challenges - Peer Pressure

This week I thought I would write some posts about how enterprise decision management can help address some of the very real challenges in decision making. First up is peer pressure. A friend sent me this article from the Sloan Review - Applying (and Resisting) Peer Influence -and a couple of key concepts are clear from reading it:

• Peer pressure can really influence decision making
  Especially when a situation is uncertain people look to their peers to see what they are doing. However, as noted below, they often don’t realize this.
• People are poor at recognizing why they do what they do
  For instance, peer pressure is widely discounted with people giving all sorts of reasons for their decisions even though the clear cause (to an outside observer) was peer pressure.

From a business perspective, the first issue has a couple of consequences. Firstly it means that once a few people on your staff have made a “bad” decision it will become more likely that other members of staff will copy it - a misunderstood policy rapidly spreads because “everyone” is interpreting it that way. Secondly it means that staff who are confused or uncertain may ask each other rather than consulting manuals or guidelines as they prefer peer support to directives.  Lastly it means that changing behavior can be very challenging if the old behavior has been around a while as even new staff will see that their peers act in the old way.

Clearly decision automation and management can help with some of this. Automated engines are not, generally, very worried about their peers. They will always look up the rules rather than see what someone else is doing and analytic models have a statistical basis that ensures significance. There is, I suppose, a risk that peer pressure will affect how rules or models are developed but this process tends to be much easier to monitor and control as it is done under less time pressure than making a specific decision and by staff who are typically better trained and paid.

The paper says:

a more subtle problem occurs when they fail to recognize how peer influence is affecting their own decisions. Such situations can be particularly dangerous, leading people to do exactly what they shouldn’t, all because they inadvertently have listened to the wrong voices.

and this illustrates the particular danger of uncontrolled decision making as the influence of other (potentially bad decision makers) will not even be recognized.

The second point has a broader applicability in the automation of decisions. It is increasingly important for organizations to be able to show how they made a decision, for compliance purposes. If the only way you have to record why a decision was made a certain way then you rely on what people say influenced them. However, this is unlikely to be the full story. Automated decisions, in contrast, can log the exact rules and models that were fired, what the result was and how therefore the decision was made. This is precise and unambiguous and so much more likely to be satisfactory to a regulator.

Decision automation and management is not a perfect answer to every kind of decision but the very real dangers of peer pressure are one more reason for considering decision management.

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June 20, 2008

Buying predictive analytics like books - Zementis ADAPA

Zementis has recently announced its ADAPA predictive analytics edition for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. This essentially allows you to deploy PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language, an XML format for defining predictive analytic models) on the Amazon compute cloud. Based on their Enterprise Edition (which has PMML deployment, reporting and business rules (using Drools), this version just allows the deployment and execution of predictive analytics models.

It uses browser based deployment, is standards based - web services for run-time access, PMML for model design and JSR 73 (Java Data Mining) for run-time access to the engine. Because it uses PMML you can use R or SPSS or SAS to build a model because these tools all support export into PMML.

It offers all the usual cloud benefits - scalable, pay as you go, reliable - as well as security through dedicated and non-shared virtual machines on the cloud - single tenant instances. It offers flexible instances - small, large, extra large - all managed from a browser-based ADAPA control center. Payment is done through the amazon.com payment engine (hence the post title) and all instances are managed through a Control Center. A simple interface allows you to pick the instance type you want and create it from the browser. You can easily create multiple instances e.g. one for QA, one for development and another for production. Once an instance is started you can load a PMML model (or several), get warnings if there are issues with the PMML, interact with the PMML to fix these issues and deploy the model. Once deployed you can use the model as a web services (for which WSDL is generated for you) or interactively. This allows you to upload and run data - either to score it or to match it against expected scores for testing. Scored data can be downloaded into Excel or anything else using CSV. Help is provided through an extensive blog with video tutorials.

This is a fascinating and quite different model for predictive analytics. Rather than having to invest in significant infrastructure to put models to work in production you are now able to use the cloud and deploy them as you go and as you like very cost effectively. Given how often the barrier to value from predictive analytics is the deployment of the model, this is a great development and I look forward to seeing what people do with it.

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Tibco becomes the first company with BPM, visualization, rules and data mining

Just saw the announcement that Tibco is buying Insightful. Insightful has a range of data mining tools build on the open source R algorithms as well as some proprietary pieces. This means that Tibco now has a BPM environment, a rules/event processing one, Spotfire for visualization and data mining/predictive analytics development and deployment. In theory this could mean that they have a real decision management platform coming, though the fact that the Insightful announcement is linked tightly to Spotfire makes me concerned that this is just going to be data mining for pretty pictures.

No-one from Tibco has told us anything yet beyond what’s in the press release but hopefully more will become known in the coming weeks. Interesting…

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June 19, 2008

Technical rules event in Dallas

James Owen and others have been organizing what they bill as a technical rules event in Dallas this October. It’s the 22nd to the 24th (so it doesn’t clash with the EDM Summit) Here’s the agenda. They have some great speakers and some interesting experts participating so it should be worthwhile for those among you able to be in Dallas in October.

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Intalio User Conference Wrap Up

Back from the Intalio User Conference and thought I would post a few thoughts post-event. Overall I was very impressed by the event - it was well organized and executed, free wifi, plenty of power in the rooms etc. I was a little disappointed that there were not more user case studies but I suspect that was a function of this being the first user conference more than anything - having got a user conference off the ground myself it takes a couple of years.

It was encouraging to see how many of the BPMS implementors (both VARs and customers) could see the value of adding decision management to their existing process-centric approaches. Clearly folks who have a couple of BPM projects under their belt can see the power of externalizing and managing the decisions in those processes. I was also impressed at the range and quality of open source products both from Intalio and from its partners. Nice to see more open source products further up the stack. Finally I was impressed by the number of countries from which attendees came and the overall level of experience in the people I met.

I am looking forward both to future Intalio events and to seeing an open source stack that delivers process and decision management emerging over the next few months.

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June 18, 2008

Demand Driven Development, Intalio, Rules

Shao Feng presented the D3 (Demand Driven Development) program and their work on integrating business rules into the Intalio BPMS. A few notes on the D3 program:

• Not custom development
• Community suggested projects
• Customers put up money for features they really want and get credit for them
• Some are decoupled and done offshore, some more tightly integrated and done onshore
• Product enhancements are priced at cost - not a profit making effort - though they include the cost of maintenance for 3 years
• A forum is used to gather feedback on suggestions and gauge demand before estimating
• Completed features become part of standard product - typically in the enterprise edition. Some become part of the community edition and some move to the open source code base.

Currently working on some interesting ones for which they are looking for D3 sponsors - the Drools integration, Alfresco content management integration, Liferay portal integration, Atom feed. Other suggestions include a BPMN debugger, Visio and XPDL importers, VMWare image etc. All of these are slated to be part of the 5.3 enterprise edition but D3 supporters are needed to firm up the specifications and delivery dates.

Now came the interesting piece (from my perspective), the overview of how Intalio is integrating its BPMS with the Drools BRMS. The idea is to separate business rule definition from process definition. Primarily going to use a decision table interface initially and target business analysts/process owners (programmers can use Drools directly, of course). The kind of table is very similar to Corticon’s - different columns representing attributes with one or more action columns and rows linking attribute values or ranges to a given set of outcomes. There is a wizard to help build an initial decision table and tables can be dragged and dropped onto BPMN diagrams to make it a participant and all the hook ups get created (treating it like a web service call). This implementation is a fairly pure approach to decision services (stateless, no updates). Any changes to the decision table that don’t change the data model can be deployed without versioning the process. The integration allows a set of rules to be called from a task and then uses the ability of the Intalio engine to take action to act on the results - Action handling is passed to the BPMS.

It’s clearly not a fully functional integration yet but it looks interesting and it looks like the folks at Intalio understand how this should be done. In addition they are taking advantage of all the great work Mark Proctor’s Drools team has been doing extending the core engine to more of a complete rule management environment. Going to get interesting as this gets extended…

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Using Intalio in Pennsylvania's Criminal Justice Systems

Dan Oneufer talked about the use of Intalio BPMS in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Justice Network has been established a long time and manages many aspects of the state justice system. However the counties are not well integrated into this network. Allegheny County, his example, is about 10% of the state and pretty rural. It has 50,000 criminal cases a year and 11,000+ arrest warrants. The Allegheny Standard Arrest Program (ASAP) was the pilot for the program.

The basic county-level problem is:

• 8 different participants required to prepare a case
• Communication is by paper, telephone or personal contact
• Different procedures depending on the person involved
• No accountability or transparency as to where someone is in the process

Add to that state-wide problems like

• Prison overcrowding
• Legislation for timely processing of offenders
• Utilization of resources
• Public safety

The proof of concept was to coordinate all tasks around the criminal complaint and affidavit of problem cause. ASAP was designed to expedite the required paperwork, eliminate the 18 different forms, electronically share information and reduce delays during pre-trial - traceability was key. This went well - a .Net solution with SQL Server and Crystal Reports - with 160 police departments used and a number of areas worth improving were found.

Although this went well, had to now support the other 57 counties and support their way of doing things. In addition, the reports were not real-time but historical so decided to expand the proof to build a country-level integration environment that was standards-based and reusable while supporting secure real-time processes. They made a number of decisions including:

• BPMN
  Selected as an open standard with a strong notation and mapping to BPEL. Allowed the wide variety of diagrams to be brought into a single form that could support collaboration between business and IT.
• Intalio
  Open source so low cost (important to poorly funded counties), standards to support integration with partners and different government levels, systems and people treated the same, web services focus and had integrated BAM.

The expanded proof included an application for the electronic management of the information, a flow diagram of the process, a dashboard and more. The team had legacy and client/server experience and they added a project manager (Dan) and a business analyst. Intalio helped them do some of the discovery work. Initially they focused on the creation of the criminal complaint -a small but important part. They also realized that they needed some XML experience for the forms component and added someone.

The resulting system diagram was over complex and too driven by the legacy mindset. The original system was too complex, making mapping data expensive and testing time consuming. Change, therefore, was not welcome. Realizing that this was a problem they got a subscription with Intalio and got great support - individualized, rapid, proactive. Now re-working with professional services and more training from Intalio/a business partner. They have updated the skills on the team and have revised their modeling approach to be more layered rather than linear. They adopted Intalio’s business process framework to support this. This is now getting ready to roll-out into new counties. They estimate about 3 months work to make it work for the second county. Conducting readiness assessments on counties before rolling out as counties cannot be hurried.

Future plans include adding more support for things like sentencing and parole as well as integrating bail bonds and other agencies. Better BAM to show effectiveness and more counties require additional funding which has been requested.

It’s a pity there were no hard results to share but it sounds like they are getting some good qualitative feedback from folks. For instance, a remote municipality really valued the elimination of unnecessary trips to court that take officers off the street. An interesting story in terms of the need to do more than just adopt the technology - you need to also change the mindset and design skills.

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Intalio 2.0

Ismael Ghalimi presented his vision of “what’s next” and started with some history. In 1998 he started work on what he now calls “Office 2.0″ and, while prototyping ideas, he met the other founders and started to put together a plan for a platform that would allow him (a self-confessed poor programmer) to build web applications. Intalio started in 1999 and focused on transactional workflow systems. In 2000 they started calling it a BPMS. Open Source was always part of the plan as they had little money. As they got started they kicked off a lot of open source projects for low-level components. They raised money, got started and developed the product without any sense of how to make money at open source. Like many companies they underestimated the total time and cost required and their timing was off - probably 5 years too early.

Re-launched the company in 2006, rewrote the product and returned to their open source roots. This means making the software downloadable, easy to install, easy to deploy - just like other open source programs - and this required the rewrite. Since October 2005 35,000 user organizations have registered, 400 organizations have become customers and have sold the product in 45 countries. They believe they have the largest installed base of all BPMS vendors. Part of their success, he believes, is the Commercial Open Source Model, where some of the code is licensed even though most is open source. None of the 400 customers have stopped renewing their subscription - ZERO attrition. In addition, the open source model means that no matter what happens to Intalio, the source code is available and licensed in a way that means you can always guarantee support over time.

80% of the code, including the core BPEL engine, is given to the Apache Foundation for open source. Apache even own the copyright and, as a foundation, this software is always going to be available. Eclipse likewise. The Apache license is VERY liberal. This 80% plus some other open source components is used to build the free community edition. Of the 35,000 users of this edition, many of them are in production on the free version. The Enterprise Edition adds some functionality, some support and patent indemnification and is sold as a subscription. This edition, too, includes the full source code for the product with the right to edit it freely.

Intalio focuses also on its partner network and invests heavily in it. They have 30 certified and trained resellers of the product. Very localized and always looking for new partners. Similarly they invest in industry standards like BPMN (which they led) and others that, while they did not work, drove others to come up with new standards like BPEL.

In the last 12 months they have increased their investment as it become clear the model was working. They have always offered on premise deployment but recently they added on demand deployment. The On Demand edition is available now on the Amazon cloud and allows the design and deployment of projects without buying hardware, important for evaluation. This also allowed them to virtualize the software (supporting VMWare, for instance) and make it easy to offer Intalio-based solutions as SaaS. Finally, this allows them to ship an appliance with everything on it and remote administration/upgrades. They have worked hard to support all the available CPUs, Operating systems, Application Servers and Databases. The OEM deal they did with Informatica allowed them to certify 8 CPUs, 8 Operating Systems, 7 Application systems and 7 DBMS! Just shipped Intalio BPMS 5.2 and are very happy with it.

Some stats:

• 250,000 process steps in a Dutch Government system to track all the 25M animals in the Netherlands
• This system has 250,000,000 instances running for up to 5 years
• Same system has 100,000 end users (farmers) every day
• 1,000 server grid at the US Department of Energy
• 100,000 process models at Coghead

Next up

• Next release will emerge from the Demand Driven Development (D3) features
  These features are requested by customers, voted on by the community, priced and designed by Intalio and then paid for by customers who sign up and who get a 50% credit for the money they invest. 50-75% of the engineering resources are driven this way.
• Content/Document Management System
  Intalio is being integrated with Alfresco and resells it. Very happy with the product. Will be released very soon with more to come.
• Portal
  Liferay portal is likewise being integrated.
• Enterprise Service Bus
  No one-size fits all for ESBs so are supporting AXIS2, Mule and ServiceMix - each of which has specific capabilities and strengths.
• Business Rules
  One way to reduce the complexity of processes is to put rules to work. The work integrating Drools is underway.
• Rich User Interfaces
  Currently have an Ajax based XForms implementation. To make this better, they have abstracted the API on the designer so you can use Flex, Flash, .Net, Tibco GI etc.
• Exit Paths
  Now that Oracle has dropped support for BEA/Fuego, Intalio is planning to offer services to help migrate customers to the product. Won’t be a one click tool but the migration can be made fairly straightforward. Similarly, Tibco/Staffware is not being maintained already and there are growing rumors of an acquisition so migration is an issue there.
• Verticals
  3 Vertical industries are going to get additional focus. Financial Services (which is already underway), Public Sector (Federal and Local) and Telecommunications.
• Globalization
  Moving beyond the 45 countries already supported and adding process experts to countries that reach a critical mass. Recently delivered a Japanese version (first non-English language).

All in all, an interesting history lesson and an ambitious and thoughtful plan for the future.

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Business Process - Linking Business and IT