JBoss plans open source BPM
- Article 5 of 7
- XML & Web Services newsletter, September 2004
Open Source pioneer JBoss is planning to introduce open source BPM and workflow products - a move that will worry many young and established suppliers.
Application server vendor JBoss will release new open source business process management (BPM) and workflow software in early October, according to CEO Marc Fleury. The move is certain to be a concern for many of the dozens of established and young companies competing in this nascent market.
Fleury said he hopes to extend the business model built around the popular open-source JBoss J2EE application server to the BPM software market. After a long time attempting to gain support, JBoss is at last beginning to make some ground against established application servers, albeit in specialist markets.
The JBoss model, which the company has dubbed "professional open source", offers maintenance and support licences for the JBoss application server and other application development and deployment software. The software itself remains free and its source code available to the developer community.
The intention is to convince enterprises that, although the software may have been developed in part by hobbyists and programmers working in their spare time, they can still rely on the software for mission critical applications. JBoss will support users who sign up for maintenance contract.
The software will give users an open-source alternative to BPM software from traditional application server vendors such as IBM and BEA, as well as dedicated vendors such as Intalio, Fuego and Oak Grove Systems. It will not however be the first open source BPM software, since a Java-based package called jBPM that runs on JBoss's own application server is available for download.
JBoss's product should have a better chance of being adopted than jBPM. It will be the first open source BPM system that has corporate backing. It also will fit in with other enterprise systems more easily, including other BPM systems, since it will not be based around jBPM's proprietary Process Definition Language, which has not yet been adopted by any corporate systems of note.
But while many open source applications, such as the web server Apache and the email server Sendmail, are in widespread use in the enterprise, even Linux is still an open source wildcard in the corporate psyche. Most analysts predict it will be at least another five years before Linux is seen as an enterprise product that is as dependable Windows or Sun's Solaris Unix system.
JBoss's own application server, in contrast, is not yet seen as enterprise-ready, even among the select few who have actually heard of it, despite its huge popularity with ISPs and web hosting specialists. It is likely to be a long, hard battle before JBoss is trusted as much as products from, for example, IBM or BEA. But like Linux, a groundswell of enterprises adopting open source to cut costs could take it out of the back room and into the mainstream.