I just agreed to join BonitaSoft’s Board of Directors. BonitaSoft is a rising star in Business Process Management (BPM), a market that Chausson Finance describes as currently worth $2.6 billion and expected to grow 30% per year by 2012.

The Bonita Project, the first open source BPM solution, was launched in France in 2001 by INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique), then hosted by the ObjectWeb Consortium (now OW2), and brought to maturity by Bull. The solution has already been downloaded more than 140,000 times and has more than 300 contributors. The three founders – Miguel Valdés Faura, Rodrigue Le Gall, and Charles Souillard – have created a structure to support development of both the project and the business.

BonitaSoft just announced its first round of funding of $3 million with two major investors – Ventech and Auriga Partners. I want to congratulate BonitaSoft’s management who, despite an unfavorable economic climate (particularly in terms of investment) managed to convince a pool of investors of the relevance and future prospects of their solution and their business model.

Besides the size of this market today and its forecast growth, BonitaSoft has other things going for it. On one hand, the solution takes advantage of all the well-known benefits of the open source model – ease of use and deployment, worldwide contributions, interoperability, rapid ROI, and scalability. BonitaSoft’s TOC is 10 times lower than that of proprietary solutions. Does that remind you of anything? Oh, of course – Talend!

The BPM market today resembles the data integration industry of three years ago – it is dominated by giants (Tibco, Oracle, IBM, etc.) – proprietary solutions characterized by high development, implementation, and maintenance costs, as well as an ROI that is hard to quantify and predict.

In addition, BonitaSoft serves a diverse community – government, banking and insurance, industry, technology, etc. Since the emergence of software, large, strategic markets have been its primary target. The interest shown by these institutions and large enterprises is, of course, a guarantee of continuity for current projects.

And finally, after 20 years the BPM has reached maturity. Firms now understand the benefits they can derive – increased productivity and efficiency, aligning processes with strategy, compliance and traceability, and control and integration between customers and partners.

All these factors have helped BonitaSoft build a solid and promising company. I won’t conceal that I’ve been carefully following BonitaSoft’s progress for some time and have offered both my experience and my connections. It was, therefore, quite natural to agree to join its Board of Directors. We will now work to create synergies between our software offerings that some of our customers have been asking for. And we will certainly keep you informed.

Smooth sailing, BonitaSoft!

Bertrand

Policymakers have been thinking a lot lately about how to improve the accuracy of economic performance indicators like the gross domestic product (GDP), which is to this day the dominant reference point for the progress of nations. Recently, the EU announced that they will launch a new indicator this year to measure environmental stress which will “reflect the pollution and environmental harm within the bloc’s member states, including aspects of climate change, biodiversity, air pollution, water use, and waste generation.”

As Stavros Dimas, the head of the environment directorate of the European Commission, said in the same New York Times article, “GDP, which measures short-term spending, was not traditionally intended to measure well-being. And it is not a sufficient guide for modern policymaking that takes social and environmental objectives into account. To change the world we need to change the way that we understand the world. And to do this we need to go beyond GDP.”

At the same time in France, President Sarkozy received the report he commissioned from Joseph Stiglitz a year ago when he named the Nobel Prize-winning economist head of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress; four other Nobel Prize Winners were also invited to join. This report presents identical conclusions to those reached by the European Union. “GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being, and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one.” A draft summary of the report is available on-line.

It’s always edifying to watch our government find better ways to understand our society and economy by analyzing indicators whose number and accuracy are continually increasing. Like companies, they are seeking a more precise image by analyzing data from an increasing number of sources and combining them in new ways. Does that remind you of anything? Of course. It’s all about business intelligence.

The story doesn’t say what systems will be used to include new data that feeds into the calculations for measuring well-being. Given the findings of several reports, however, open source certainly deserves a place since it helps unleash growth. We would, of course, be very proud to contribute to these calculations, particularly now that Talend has the experience, the solution, and the partner ecosystem needed to help them succeed in analyzing huge amounts of data.

Bertrand