By Cassandra Balentine
Bonitasoft’s business process management (BPM)-based application platform provides developers with an agile business application that adapts in real time to process changes, user interface updates, and the underlying data model.
Established in 2009, today the company has more than 130 employees. Headquartered in Paris, France, it operates additional offices in San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; and Grenoble, France. It is a privately-held company and declines to publicly disclose its revenue figures.
Bonitasoft’s install base varies broadly, with concentrations in building and public works, manufacturing, aeronautics, automotive, hospitality, services, agribusiness, food and beverage, banding and financial services, communications and telecommunications, transportation logistics and distribution, healthcare and medical, public sector and government, and education.
Major Update
The company recently introduced the latest version of its flagship product, Bonita BPM 7. Following nine months of development, the new version is open source and currently available for download.
“Open source BPM offers an opportunity to democratize BPM, making BPM available to organizations of all sizes, to departments inside companies, to anyone, as the Community edition of Bonita BPM is free to download,” says Miguel Valdes Faura, CEO/co-founder, Bonitasoft. “Further, embracing open source enables us to enjoy our active community of more than 120,000 members, many of whom have shared connectors, examples, and other contributions. With this extensive Community, Bonita BPM has been downloaded more than three million times—an impressive BPM distribution worldwide,” he adds.
The release of Bonita BMP 7 is the company’s biggest platform upgrade in more than two years. The direction represents a strategic evolution of the company.
The company’s approach of decoupling business logic, data, and user interfaces allows adaptability and the ability to change in real time. Maintenance and updates to user interfaces can be done independently from business workflow updates, and without taking the application offline.
Bonita BPM 7 provides a new graphical Web-based, drag-and-drop user interface (UI) designer to create personalized user interfaces. The designer is extensible, allowing developers to easily create their own widgets, and it offers efficient data binding, powerful preview, and responsive design across mobile and desktop devices.
“One of the primary innovations of this new version of Bonita BPM was the decoupling of the workflow/business logic from the UI design in order to allow independent changes on these elements, especially after deployment,” explains Valdes Faura. “This enables applications built with Bonita BPM to be highly flexible, adaptable to business and technical changes, and it’s now even possible to make changes on the fly in real time to meet business needs.
The latest release was beta tested by Bonitasoft community members, customers, and partners.
“We released a beta version of Bonita BPM in mid-April, mainly to gather feedback regarding the new functionality of the software,” says Valdes Faura. “Based on feedback from our community, customers, partners, and even Bonitasoft consultants, we improved the usability, look and feel of the UI Designer, and added embedded guidance,” he notes.
Version 7
According to Bonitasoft, Bonita BPM 7 is built on the most widely used open source BPM solution in the marketplace, giving developers the ability to create powerful processes using BPMN 2.0 standard. It connects to third-party systems such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning systems.
Bonita BPM 7 adds several more extensible frameworks in addition to the existing connector builder, enabling developers to freely code their own graphical components and REST APIs. SW
Jul2015, Software Magazine
