One of the world's largest providers of free software, Red Hat, is now collaborating with Signavio. An integrated solution for modelling and executing business processes will be provided under the name "jBPM - powered by Signavio". jBPM project lead Tom Baeyens presents the project at the Red Hat-congress JBoss World in Chicago today.

"Many software vendors promise that process models that have been defined by business analysts can be transformed into executable software 'automagically'. This vision has proved unrealistic in practice", Baeyens emphasizes. The approach taken in cooperation with the Hasso-Plattner-Institute still starts with the graphical design of process models. The technical details, however, are defined in a classical programming environment.

Signavio donates parts of its tool functionality in the context of the joint Open source project. "So far, we have only concentrated on business departments as customers. The joint solution addresses IT departments as well for the first time", Gero Decker, managing director of the Berlin-based company, remarks. In addition to the Open source solution, the existing products enable the comprehensive design and analysis of process landscapes in a collaborative way.

Academic support was provided by the Business Technology Group at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute, led by Prof. Mathias Weske. By integrating their modeling platform Oryx, the project is also promoted in the academic community.

The following screencast gives a good first overview of the integrated solution.

jBPM homepage: http://jbpm.org

JBoss World: http://www.jbossworld.com