JBoss takes on business process management
JBoss Inc. has added business process management (BPM) to its growing roster of open source software.
The company has hired Tom Baeyens, the founder and lead developer of jBpm, an open source workflow engine, it announced Monday. As with its other products, JBoss will sell services and support for jBpm (which becomes JBoss jBPM) but the software will continue to be available for no charge under an open source license.
BPM software is used to orchestrate a series of transactions involving separate applications into an automated flow of events. For example, a company could use it to automate the steps involved in approving and reimbursing an expense report. Oracle Corp., BEA Systems Inc., IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are all adding BPM capabilities to their products.
JBoss Inc., which is best known for its open-source Java application server, has been expanding into new areas, often by hiring the lead developers of popular open source middleware projects. In the past 18 months it has hired prominent developers from Hibernate, Tomcat, JavaGroups and Nukes, among others.
Its goal is to make businesses less wary of using open source software by providing consulting and support services and the backing of an established vendor. It typically integrates the products more tightly with its application server, although it has pledged that it won't compromise their ability to function with Java servers from other vendors.
"The benefit to customers is that we are making jBPM safe to use. We now provide support, training and indemnification, so it's not just a stand-alone project out there with nothing behind it," said Bob Bickel, JBoss vice president of strategy and development.
Baeyens began the jBpm project about two years ago and version 1.0 was released in December. On Monday, JBoss announced that JBoss jBPM version 2.0 is now also available. The upgrade is easier for developers to use and can support more complex workflow patterns, according to JBoss.
However, jBPM does not yet support BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), a popular emerging standard for BPM. The company plans to add native support for BPEL by the first quarter of 2005, Bickel said.
JBoss is also working on better developer tools for the workflow engine, which Bickel acknowledged are quite limited today. Over the next year it will release a graphical workflow designer that integrates with the Eclipse platform and a process manager for Web-based workflow applications. It will also integrate jBPM with Nukes, which is a portal framework.
Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Zapthink LLC in Waltham, Massachusetts, said good tools are essential for a workflow engine.
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