Stephen Withers at iTWire spoke with Bonitasoft CEO Miguel Valdes Faura about the history of Bonitasoft, the rationale behind its founding and growth, and where the company is today. Here's a brief summary of what he covered in his extensive interview.
A bit of background
The founders of Bonitasoft decided at the start 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.
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.
As private company, Bonitasoft needs a revenue source to sustain itself for the benefit of employees, community users, customers, partners and shareholders.
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 and follow-up) and additional product capabilities – for companies with demanding production requirements such as clustering, high availability and monitoring. Bonita Enterprise is available on a PaaS basis (as Bonita Cloud) as an alternative to running it on-premises.
Each Bonita release contains features in both editions that deliver more value along specific axes for both business and technical users. The most recent release of Bonita 2022.1 contains improvements and capabilities more suited for developers, but the previous release (Bonita 2021.2) offered a new set of capabilities for business-minded citizen developers on automation project teams.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
-Miguel Valdes Faura
There's much more in the full interview at iTWire!
