BonitaSoft, a provider of open source business process management (BPM) solutions, this morning announced that it has landed $11 million in funding in a Series B round led by Serena Capital. Existing investors such as Ventech and Auriga Partners also participated.
It makes me wonder if Alfresco (Activiti) or others will be exploring more funding in the current environment. It seems inevitable to me that an open source vendor or project would emerge as an interesting alternative to the commercial vendors. I just wonder which one it will be – or is it possible that I’m wrong and it will be more than one?
That means an interoperability validation tool needs to test, in addition to the normal semantic rules of BPMN, rules that relate the semantic and graphics elements.
For example, the rule in question here might be something like this: In a diagram (i.e. page of the model), if a process is represented by a pool then all elements of that process on the page must be enclosed within the pool shape.
It is going to be a long road to get there but Bruce is, at least, making progress and uncovering some of the semantic (as well as syntactic) issues.
I have run across 5 BPMS vendors interested in my BPMN-I work: Activiti, BonitaSoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM. Of the five, BonitaSoft is so far the most successful in actually implementing BPMN 2.0-based model interchange. Not only that, they are the only one so far that has implemented any of my suggestions for conforming to the xsd and BPMN-I.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: when it comes to interchange, I think open-source offers the best alternatives. Activiti was probably first occupied by providing an upgrade path to folks running JBPM3 and 4, rather than from other BPMN2 tools (very few of which yet export proper BPMN2 XML).
I’d agree with Bruce’s assessment that so far, BonitaSoft does the best job importing someone else’s BPMN2. In a project last summer we exported JBPM4 to BPMN2 (via an xsl transform) and then loaded that into BonitaSoft, and while we ran into a few issues, we could only get BonitaSoft and Oracle to import BPMN2 at the time. Unfortunately for Oracle we had to add quite a bit of custom Oracle decoration to the XML to get the diagram to show up decently. (BonitaSoft has an auto-layout feature that helped).
Bruce has been writing about BPMN2 model interchange for some time, and I’m a fan of the work he’s doing in this regard, and the light he’s shining on lack of vendor effort. Here’s his latest take on the status of things:
Last summer I posted on the challenge of achieving process model interchange via the BPMN 2.0 standard. In the half year since then, vendor progress toward that goal has been about zero. It seems that vendors, in particular the ones that drove the standard, don’t really care about this most fundamental user expectation of any standard. Ah well, no surprise there… But in the past couple weeks, some encouraging developments. Activiti and BonitaSoft – both are open source startups with a BPMN 2.0-based BPMS – have begun to tout BPMN 2.0 import and export. Neither one supports even the Descriptive subclass of the spec (what I call Level 1 in the training), but both vendors are full speed ahead at expanding the capabilities of their process engine.
I’ve always felt (even when I worked at Lombardi) that interchange would be best served in the open source market – no single vendor has much impetus to do it – and invariably there would be bugs that the vendor doesn’t view as high priority (hey, the lombardi to oracle transformation exhibits some obscure bug, not sure whether lombardi isn’t exporting right or oracle isn’t importing right… think either vendor ever wants to fix that? But in the open source world – even if the sources and targets are NOT open source, if the “interchange” (the spec) and the “transform” (the code that does the work) are open source, then (at least) developers who experience issues can actually attempt to fix them (even if those fixes are a temporary hardcode or hack).
Bruce goes on to comment on IBM:
It will be interesting to see if IBM takes Lombardi Edition in a BPMN 2.0 direction; I’m not sure Phil Gilbert is a believer in its value. If not, when Activiti and BonitaSoft finish the Common Executable subclass of BPMN 2.0, the BPMS marketplace could get very interesting.
I think Phil Gilbert’s issue with BPMN2 was that it got lost in the weeds (my interpretation based on reading his blog posts at the time). For example, every BPMN2 xml I’ve seen so far has several vendor-specific extensions (which are allowed by the spec, but likely meaningless to other tools until someone writes the adapters). As BPMN2 was getting started he was a fan and wanted it to succeed, and he drove lombardi to be one of the early adopters of a native BPMN 1.0 engine (not that it covered 100% of the spec- but there was no lossy transformation to some other format to interfere with the interpretation of your BPMN – Model preserving, to use Keith Swenson’s terminology). Certainly, BPMN2 implementations to-date have failed Phil’s test of providing tools so good that no one needs to bother to read the XML behind the model…
I don’t have any inside knowledge of IBM’s stance on BPMN2 with respect to their products, but I, too, will be interested to see what shakes out at Impact. If they don’t make progress it might be interesting to write a BPMN2 exporter or importer. But it is a fair amount of work to do as an outsider. I can see why IBM might not view interchange as a high priority – again, a good argument for an open source implementation of interchange.