Intalio Buys Rival BPM Provider FiveSight

Software consolidation continued this week as Intalio acquired FiveSight Technologies, a privately held maker of open source business process execution language (BPEL) software.

Chicago-based FiveSight develops software for the BPEL 2.0 specification to give companies a way to synchronize distributed computing practices, like Web services , with a company’s business processes. Orchestrating services and processes can trigger core business transactions.

Intalio’s PXE BPEL 2.0 engine is used in Sun’s Java Studio Enterprise.

Major software makers IBM and Oracle offer BPM as part of their large stacks, but there are few independent players left. Oracle bought Collaxa and is offering that company’s technology in its BPEL Process Manager.

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer said 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.

“The Intalio acquisition is further evidence of the consolidation of the space,” Schmelzer said. “By itself, it really isn’t going to change the market, but in general, there are fewer startups doing innovation, leaving much of the SOA innovation happening by the big guys.”

But Intalio and Active Endpoints, both of whom offer open source implementations of BPEL engines, are still in the game. For Intalio, acquiring one of its last independent rivals is a perfect fit.

Intalio has incorporated the FiveSight technology within Intalio BPMS 4.0, which is currently available through an “early adopter program” and will be released to the public in the first quarter in 2006.

Intalio is planning 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 similar open source licenses later in 2006.

Intalio also announced that Maciej Szefler, who created FiveSight’s BPEL 2.0 engine, has joined Intalio as chief architect.

He will work closely with Assaf Arkin, Intalio’s chief technology officer and co-author of the BPEL specification, on developing Intalio’s next version BPMS software.