http://solutions.journald…bune_bpms.shtml
A lire aujourd’hui, un bon article de Pierre Bonnet (le site BPMS.info)sur BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) qui a le mérite de présenter ce langage et l’état de l’art actuel tant du point de vue de la normalisation que des solutions technologiques.
To James:
I had a look at this article and it seems that opensource has now one more good reason to penetrate the Enterprise, BPM software, it makes no doubt. Nevertheless, it is not really « free », the license fee is free but not the implementation cost which remains the same. It makes a difference.
Then BPM is most of the time considered as mission-critical and relying on a vendor still allows the company to have a 24/7 customer care service, and this remains a competitive vendor advantage, except if Intalio is able to do the same but we have no figures about this as far as I know. Then some vendors (like FileNet) have more than 20 years of experience in BPM software and the core product is really mature and robust if we talk about millions of transactions per hour/day. We have no reference neither benchmarks about Opensource in this area even if some Opensource software perform very well (CMS for instance).
To me, it is a reasonable field of investigation for companies to have a look to Opensource as plenty of these solutions (not only BPM ones) are fully operational and reliable. On the other hand, a company doing this choice has to keep in mind that all integration, development and support efforts will have to be done anyway. This will be accomplished most of the time by the integrator and they should take care about the real cost over the years. What we see on our market here in France is that Opensource leads to an higher integration cost compared to vendors software specially if organisations want some specific functions not available in the original product.
Apart from this, I would say that Opensource will certainly take a new dimension in the cominbg years and vendors have to react (value prop, license model) in order to stay competitive against these « free » solutions. Do not forget either that Opensource license (GPL) has some obligations too (like sharing source code even if done for a final customer, some companies do not want their own code to be shared all over the world).
James, you’re true, it is a nice topic for a future note down here. Stay tuned …
Would love to know your thoughts on the following blog entry: http://weblog.itredux.com/2005/12/why_buy_a_bpms_.html In fact, I would love to know your thoughts on open source in general. Maybe a good topic for your next blog entry?
http://duckdown.blogspot.com/