A revolution in business process management?

Ask anyone who deals with reengineering the way a company does business, and they can tell you horror stories about getting software to adapt to changing business processes.

Currently, enterprise application integration (EAI) and middleware providers offer some form of workflow or business process management (BPM). But it's typically a task that requires the programming equivalent of extreme mountain climbing skills, especially in situations with applications from several vendors and multiple, independent processes that must be coordinated.

Intalio, a nearly four-year-old company specializing in BPM, may have cracked the code for ridding BPM of its rough edges and steep costs. The company's Intalio n³ 2.0 software can reduce the development cost of designing and implementing business processes by up to 75 percent, according to Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio co-founder and chief strategy officer.

That reduction comes primarily through eliminating the need for manual coding and by treating processes-not just data and applications-as the fundamental building blocks of corporate information systems, Ghalimi told me during an interview last week.

I am highly skeptical of the programming-for-non-programmers claim, but Intalio appears to have some validity. The software provides a visual interface for designing end-to-end business processes, including messaging, data transformation, transactions, and business rules. Existing business process models, procedures and rules can be imported and exposed for use within the Intalio environment without writing code. With the click of a button, visual maps are turned into executable code that runs on the Intalio server.

For corroboration, I talked to Eric Austvold, research director at AMR Research who covers the BPM marketplace. He was also impressed with Intalio's BPM platform.

"Intalio represents the next way to shrink the cycle time of bringing new products to market, dynamically creating relationships with suppliers, building data exchange pipelines and mapping out the business processes," Austvold said. "Today it takes months and a number of development tools. Intalio consolidates a number of development tools into the Intalio n3 environment."

In addition to a single, integrated environment--which Ghamili calls a process-oriented IDE (Interface Development Environment)--Intalio abstracts the design of business processes from specific implementations. As an example, if a company is using enterprise applications such as SAP and PeopleSoft, Intalio introspects them at the API and the process level, including Web services. If a business process in SAP and one in PeopleSoft perform a similar function, Intalio generates a single process and links it to both applications. You end up with a single, application-independent business process that works across both applications.

This architecture-which also allows for reuse of processes and dynamic changes at execution time--offers for far more flexibility than traditional EAI or workflow solutions. Intalio also includes adapters and connectors for a broad range of applications and middleware. XPage, Intalio's XML-based language, replaces the use of several languages, including JSP, Java, JavaScript, XML, XSLT, HTML, and CSS.

Intalio's visual development environment and ease of use are rooted in its support of emerging process modeling languages. Visual models are converted into BPML (Business Process Modeling Language) or BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) code. Ghamili estimates that 50,000 to100,000 lines of J2EE code could be replaced by 100 lines of BPML code.

Intalio was a co-founder of the organization www.bpmi.org that created BPML, hoping to establish a standard, platform-independent meta-language as a foundation for its products and the market. Subsequently, a consortium of IBM, Microsoft, and BEA systems developed BPEL4WS in competition with BPML. Intalio was smart to support both in its product. At some point the two modeling languages could merge into a single standard; with IBM, Microsoft and BEA driving BPEL4WS, it's not difficult to determine which faction is in the driver's seat.

WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface) is also in the picture. WSCI defines the interaction between services deployed across multiple systems, and facilitates interoperability between BPML and BPEL4WS, which define the business processes behind each service. Intalio, along with BEA, SAP and Sun, co-developed the WSCI 1.0 specification.

Austvold believes that Intalio could have a major impact just as Oracle did in creating the relational database market. But, he also sees significant obstacles along the road. "Intalio has an academic lead," Austvold said. "A number of companies, such as IBM with WebSphere, Microsoft with BizTalk and smaller firms like Fuego, Lombardi Software, and Savion are pursuing BPM, but at this point Intalio has thought through the problem of managing business processes in an enterprise better than any company in the planet. The biggest challenge for the company is surviving in this [economic] ice age of technology."

The company currently has a few showcase customers, including BAE Systems, iUniverse, LexisNexus and Computer Sciences Corporation. With an average pricing target between $500,000 to $1 million, however, Intalio will require high-level buy in, with participation from both business and IT constituents in most corporations.

From Ghalimi's perspective, Intalio goes a long way toward bridging the gap between business and IT. Business owners have a tool that allows them to model business processes without worrying about the underlying code and complexities, and technical staff have flexible, fast tool to help them align with the business priorities.

Intalio appears to have made significant progress in delivering plug and play BPM. Now it's up to the market to decide if it can be the next Oracle.

What are your experiences in bringing business process management into your organization? Leave a message in our TalkBack forum or e-mail me at dan.farber@cnet.com.