Bonitasoft: BPM for the masses – and the most demanding

Tuesday, 19 April 2022 15:15

Bonitasoft: BPM for the masses – and the most demanding

By Stephen Withers

Bonitasoft co-founder Miguel Valdés Faura

GUEST INTERVIEW: Bonitasoft was founded in 2009 with the goal of democratising the use of business process management technology. iTWire spoke to co-founder Miguel Valdés Faura.

Bonitasoft was founded in 2009 by Faura, Charles Souillard and Rodrigue Le Gall to continue the development and promotion of the Bonita open source business process management (BPM) project that was created eight years earlier by Faura and a team of researchers led by François Charoy at INRIA, France's National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation.

The founders made a conscious decision to make open source values – transparency, excellence, meritocracy and collaboration – part of the new company's DNA, and to ensure that an open source version of the software would available to anyone to download and use in production.

That way, anyone, anywhere would be able to take advantage of a BPM solution.

But as a private company, Bonitasoft needed a revenue source to sustain itself for the benefit of employees, community users, customers, partners and shareholders, Faura explained.

So the team created Bonita Enterprise – a commercial edition of the software, sold as a subscription that includes a wide range of professional services (including support SLAs and personalised follow-up) and additional product capabilities – for companies with demanding production requirements and the need for a strong partner to guarantee the success of their deployments.

Those additional capabilities include clustering, high availability and monitoring for companies with demanding production requirements. And Bonita Enterprise is available on a PaaS basis (as Bonita Cloud) as an alternative to running it on-premises.

But the free Bonita Community edition – which includes all capabilities required to develop and deploy process automation projects – has not been left to stagnate. Over the last 13 years, it has has been a source of pride for Bonitasoft as it has been downloaded millions of times and it is used in production by thousands of organisations around the world.

It also serves as the starting point of Bonitasoft sales cycle, Faura said. Customers often start their evaluation of the Bonita technology by downloading the Bonita Community edition and evaluating it at their own pace, using the documentation, discussing with other members of the community, and developing a first project.

Bonitasoft maintains that open source, as a business model, is fair and sustainable. The entire Bonita company has made a commitment to the community and customers to work to make both the open source and the commercial editions better every day.

Today, Bonitasoft is surrounded by an ecosystem of more than 240,000 members and customers in 75+ countries, and Bonita is the most widely used open source platform for digital process automation.

Those users include the University of Queensland, which started using the Bonita digital process automation platform in 2016 and is now running some 70 processes on the platform, supporting students and staff.

These processes sit on top of the university's legacy systems, and present clean, modern interfaces as expected by the digital native student (and increasingly staff) population. Bonita is being used with university systems including:

· Student systems: registrations, grades, records
· HR system for staff and employees
· Finance
· Reporting
· Record keeping
· Identity
· Organisational structure

Other industries where Bonitasoft has had particular success include the banking, insurance, and finance sector. "Stringent international and national finance regulations require good governance and process-based applications can provide both solid guide rails and flexible modern financial services apps," said Faura.

Bonita is also widely used in the public sector for citizen and other governmental services, and in healthcare, but there are also Bonita processes running in retail, manufacturing, energy, public and private education, and telecommunications services, he added.

So what sets Bonita apart from competing systems?

"The Bonita digital process automation platform is fully open source, and specifically aimed to give multidisciplinary technical teams the widest possible set of tools to create process-based applications and automation projects," said Faura.

"Extension points throughout the platform allow developers to connect to nearly any external information system, from legacy systems to modern API-exposing apps and platforms. This means that the technical team can fully integrate business applications with their company's unique enterprise information systems stack."

Bonita's extensibility means developers can carry out some parts of a project using the tools they prefer, rather than being locked into a specific toolset. This provides them with valuable freedom when implementing Bonita-based applications.

And at the same time, Bonita makes provision for non-technical members of the project team to play an active part in aspects such as business data management, user interfaces/customer journey, and reporting. This is achieved with Bonita Studio, which provides a variety of native low-code features. Where additional capabilities are required, extensions are available from Bonitasoft and other developers, and may also be created in-house.

Another distinction is that Bonita's most recent release (2022.1) includes the most integrable Docker image on the market for an orchestrated platform deployment, Faura said.

Each Bonita release contains features that deliver more value along specific axes for both business and technical users, though the amount delivered may vary from release to release. The most recent release of Bonita 2022.1 is tilted towards developers, but the previous release (Bonita 2021.2) did a lot for business-minded citizen developers on automation project teams.

For example, Bonita 2021.2's project composition feature simplifies Bonita Studio for non-technical users, as well as allowing developers to create extensions. Business users now can easily manage these extensions, adding new ones through the Bonita Marketplace, from public and private repositories or from files. Citizen developers on a Bonita automation project can easily integrate extensions without technical knowledge as project developers can share these through repositories.

"These business users can upgrade extensions in a few clicks as the changes are automatically done by Bonita Studio," he said.

"And the project overview feature helps business users quickly find where connectors are used in their projects to see and understand the interactions of their processes with third party systems."

It also makes it easier for any type of user to understand the different elements of a Bonita automation project: how to create them, what their goal or purpose is.

"The Bonita 2022.2 release will be coming later this year, and there will be additional features and value aimed for business users in this next version, now in development," Faura concluded.

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