Intalio Buys FiveSight Technologies

Redwood City, Calif.-based Intalio, which calls itself the open source BPMA (business process management system) company, acquired Chicago-based FiveSight for an undisclosed amount. The two companies have a history of working together.

BPEL, a standard of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions.

Intalio integrated some FiveSight technology in its Intalio BPMS 4.0, which is currently available through an Early Adopter Program and will be generally available in the first quarter of 2006, the company said.

Meanwhile, Intalio officials said the company plans to continue the development of the FiveSight BPEL 2.0 engine under the open source Common Public License and release its BPMN process designer and BPEL4People workflow suite under open-source licenses later in 2006.

Moreover, Intalio also announced that Maciej Szefler, architect of FiveSights BPEL 2.0 engine, has joined Intalio as chief architect. He will work with Assaf Arkin, Intalios chief technology officer and co-author of the BPEL specification, on developing the companys next generation of open source BPMS software.

"This is more evidence of continued consolidation in the SOA/WS [service-oriented architecture/Web services] markets," said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC. "Theres an interesting substory here about the lack of significant new startup activity in the space and the movement to consolidation and large-vendor dominance of the space."

Indeed, said Schmelzer: "One of the interesting things to note is that even though there has been significant activity and dramatic upswing in the investment around service-oriented architecture and Web services, we havent seen nearly the amount of startup activity as we have in the past around similar waves of technology innovation. "In many ways, the space is consolidating around the larger vendors, such that much of the innovation is coming from established vendors, or at least being acquired by them. Only a small pocket of startup companies are emerging as companies capable of sustaining long-term viability while the others are getting acquired and consolidated at an increasing pace. Indeed, the market is seeming to favor consolidation and convergence of capabilities over emergence of new companies and best-of-breed approaches."

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In a statement, Ismael Ghalimi, founder and CEO of Intalio, said: "Intalio was started as an open source company and initiated several major open-source projects such as OpenEJB, which served as a foundation for Apache Geronimo. With this acquisition, we are bringing open source to the world of Business Process Management and have what it takes to change the economics of the BPM industry."

Meanwhile, "The FiveSight PXE BPEL 2.0 engine has been embedded by major open source projects such as the ServiceMix Enterprise Service Bus and leading development tools like Suns Java Studio Enterprise," said Paul Brown, founder of FiveSight Technologies, in a statement.

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