I’m just back to France after spending 2 fruitful weeks in the San Francisco Bay Area. During those 2 weeks I met with more than 30 CEO’s and top executives of major open source companies including RedHat, SpringSource, OpenBravo, Canonical, Acquia, Ingres, JasperSoft, SugarCRM, Talend, eXo Platform, PushToTest, Hippo, SauceLabs, Extentech, AlienVault and GroundWork. I had a great time discussing open source interoperability, cloud computing, and BPM of course.

While initially this trip was supposed to be just one week, the famous volcano ash cloud helped me make the decision to stay a bit longer

My trip started with the SugarCRM conference. I have to say that Larry Augustin and his team did a great job offering an impressive panel of speakers this year (and not only because I was part of it .) The main BonitaSoft partners were there – Talend, eXo Platform and JasperSoft – so we took the opportunity to discuss our product integration and joint activities (a couple of great things are coming there). The nice thing about those major events is that customers, community members and users also attend so it’s a perfect place to introduce new features and to get good feedback.

During my presentation at the SugarCRM Conference, I decided to cover a hot topic that companies are facing when deploying CRM solutions: how to improve Customer Relationships with Business Process Management technologies. In my talk I introduced how BPM brings value to an existing CRM solution, such as Sugar, by adding a layer of abstraction between business requirements and CRM implementation. I provided a “no fluff just stuff” kind of presentation including a demo illustrating how Bonita Open Solution and SugarCRM can work together to manage sales processes in an organization.

After my talk, I attended some of the other open source vendor sessions and nearly everybody was talking about the same topic: “the Cloud.” BI on the Cloud, Middleware Platform on the Cloud, ERP on the Cloud and even ECM on the Cloud. While most of those sessions were an introduction on how each of these technologies can be used/deployed in either a public or private cloud, I went further with that with Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo Platform. I really appreciate the way his team is adding multitenancy, scalability and elasticity to their new GateIn platform, co-developed with RedHat. Nice also to see there how Bonita Open Solution could leverage those capabilities as a part of the new eXo DMS module.

Those technical discussions about the Cloud led to business discussions at the Open Source Think Tank Conference in Napa. That was also a great event in which we talked a lot about the impact of Cloud computing in open source, and particularly on new business model opportunities. Discussions at the OSS Think Tank included license issues, partner relationships and business opportunities for open source vendors that embrace the cloud.

From a BonitaSoft point of view, our technology is already Cloud aware, meaning that any BPM application generated by Bonita Open Solution can easily be deployed in a Cloud environment. In such a deployment, users can embed the BPM engine in a web application and deploy it in a lightweight application server such as Tomcat and run the whole thing on Amazon EC2 for example. I see a huge potential for multitenancy BPM deployments of Bonita Open Solution -specifically, with a single instance of Bonita deployed in the Cloud to be leveraged by multiple customers, with data isolation between them.

And it’s also good to be home again!

Miguel

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 12:50 and is filed under Day to Day, News, Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.