This article from Todd Barr, of Alfresco, made me think again about how open-source software might impact BPM. The point of the article is that VMWare is rumored to be acquiring SUSE Linux from Novell – and that this is evidence of the march of open source into commercial software companies.

I agree.

I think the key issue is one of complements and substitutes.  If you are selling software, you want the complements to your product(s) to be cheaper or free, because those complements *increase* the value of your product.  If you’re selling peanut-butter, you sure would like the price of bread to go down… even to zero.  A better treatment of this subject than Chris Dixon’s blog post about Twitter and Twitter Apps cannot be found.

The only question in BPM is… what are the substitutes… and what are the complements? It depends entirely upon what your primary business is built around.  If you’ve built your business around selling BPM software, then the complements are templates, databases, application servers, development tools, web services… all the other enterprise applications on the market.

If you’re selling one of those other applications or stack elements – then you want BPM to be cheap or free (a complement), because it enhances the value of your offering.

The next few years in BPM are going to be interesting.

A couple of posts from Alfresco personnel about the launch of Activiti hit the wires over the last day or two.

First, John Newton explains why Alfresco was interested in getting involved in the Activiti project:

Activiti emerged from our desire to have an Apache-licensed BPM engine. Although we were quite happy with the jBPM engine, it’s LGPL license was preventing us from OEM’s Alfresco to larger software companies that were concerned about any open source license with the letter G in it. It’s irrelevant that they shouldn’t be concerned about it, we intended to take care of it. It’s understandable that RedHat did not want to change its license, but our business needs dictated that we needed to find an alternative.

[...]

By answering these questions, Activiti is addressing the requirements of business process management for new applications. The Activiti engine as small as a few classes that are embedded in your application or as big as an internet and consumer scale engagement server. Applications that wouldn’t have even considered a large scale, stand alone workflow server because of cost and complexity will now be able to freely embed a business process engine. However, new Cloud applications

So, there was a belief that ECM software needs good workflow, a licensing concern, and an interest in an embeddable engine that scales from smallest to largest installations.  Not a bad business case for someone in the business of opensource ECM.

On another note, Joram Barrez writes an article that captures links to many of the news stories and blogs that covered the launch of Activiti. I was even mentioned in the flurry of responses.  I’ll top my quote just slightly – I was not the only person on my team who downloaded, installed, and played with the demo setup.  I guess it isn’t usual for people to install the product they’re writing about … usually you need a license! And I’m very partial to BPM engines that are written in Java to natively support Mac (or Linux).  (as an aside, I hope IBM / Lombardi will support Mac/Linux fully as well (there are no real technical issues preventing it)).

Well, its only the second day since the Activiti news hit the wire and we have quite a few reactions.  Kudos to Theo Priestley for an unconventional take:

But there’s something else brewing under the surface. Whilst I could have focused on a review based on a powerpoint presentation, Tom’s direction made it pretty clear that he’s throwing down the gauntlet to the likes of Bonitasoft; we’re going with Apache and we’re going to win.

As Theo points out, there has been, lately, less vocal support of open source BPM – Intalio has been a bit quieter, and to the extent anyone is getting press, it is Bonitasoft – while jBPM went largely unnoticed outside of the developer community.

On our call with Tom and the Alfresco team, we specifically asked about the licensing – why Apache instead of LGPL – (honestly, I thought both were reasonably permissive) – and John Newton expressed the point of view that most software vendors were very comfortable with the Apache license, and not as comfortable with LGPL. So they believe more software vendors will be likely to take up Activiti as an embedded solution.

I think it is a good goal to make Activity embeddable.  But I advise them not to lose sight of having a good, complete, solution as well – which I believe is much of the secret sauce behind Bonita’s rise: they’re attempting to solve the whole problem, not just part of it.

ActiveVos takes a harder line view of the Activiti team throwing BPEL under the bus:

Today, Alfresco announced that it had digested the former developers of the jBPM project from JBoss. jBPM had never really made much of an impact as a BPMS because its real purpose in life was to cater to a core Java developer community. Much as hard-core coders might hate it, BPM is about collaboration among an extended development team that includes business users, analysts, developers and operations staff. jBPM was limited to developers and too proprietary to get much traction across the extended development team.

Let me be clear…we’ve got no issue with the jBPM team moving to greener pastures to try and rescue a moribund open source project. We do, however, have a very strong reaction to the transparently re-thought propaganda surrounding their new strategy. It feels like the jBPM architects have something to get off their chest about BPM in general… something they couldn’t get across inside JBoss and they’ve picked what is a rather run-of-the-mill addition of process capability to a document management system to proclaim a completely new metaphor for BPMSs.

Ouch.  I think Alex has a point: that the Activiti team could have made their announcement with no mention of BPEL at all and I don’t think it would have hurt their announcement.  However, I do think that Activiti is prioritizing correctly on BPMN2 first, and other process engine back-ends as lower priority for the core team.  If the project takes off, no doubt someone will contribute hooks to a commercial BPEL engine, or provide an open source implementation project for BPEL. There’s no reason that Tom and his core team have to provide this – at the beginning they’ll have limited resources and they need to focus on the most important bits first.

My biggest concern is how they build momentum around addressing the end-user concerns, starting from such an engineering-focused point.  It can be done – but only if really good APIs form the boundary between the BPM and the UI, and that good projects are started around the UI software that will expose BPM to the masses.