In the business process management (BPM) software market, Bonitasoft occupies a unique position. Not only did it help create the industry with its open-source platform, but the European software vendor is also considered a first-mover and continues to punch above its weight when it comes to helping its customers navigate digital transformation.
Recently, Bonitasoft co-founders Miguel Valdes and Charles Souillard decided to partner with a new investor for its next phase of growth.
Bonitasoft’s longstanding presence in this software category, as well as the expertise accumulated by its founding team over the years, are just two of the many factors we considered in our decision to invest, as publicised in our recent announcement.
In his article on the Fortino Capital blog, Investment Manager Simon Duyver takes a closer look.
Leadership and Innovation
Bonitasoft’s CEO Miguel Valdes and co-founder/COO Charles Souillard have been seen for over a decade as tech leaders, thanks to their unique Bonita platform and open-source dissemination strategy.
Since Bonitasoft was founded in 2009, the pace of innovation has only accelerated, to include further functionality to simplify and streamline programmers’ jobs so that they, in turn, can solidify – and even accelerate – their own company’s digital transformation.
It is no surprise that, to date, more than 150 customers and thousands of business users around the world rely on Bonita to automate and deploy their most critical and complex business processes.
What makes Bonitasoft different?
Even after a decade and a half in the industry, Bonitasoft continues to showcase its founders’ forward thinking. Most large businesses need BPM tools to automate and optimise their processes, as well as to represent them visually to reach a deeper understanding as quickly as possible. However, where most BPM software suites are rigid and can cause more headaches than they cure, Bonitasoft’s open-source software provides companies with the flexibility they require.
In essence, Bonitasoft is a tool for technically-minded people. Its modular architecture allows users to use the software in the way that best suits them. Developers can code within their preferred environments and then deploy their creations on Bonitasoft, or use the Bonita software development kit if they wish.
In this way, Bonitasoft stands alone in its commitment to developers.
The cloud-based iteration of the Bonita platform continues to enhance the company’s reputation as a market leader. Where many other BPM solutions feature two versions, the Bonitasoft cloud product provides the exact same functionality as the on-prem technology. Therefore, when companies choose to implement the cloud-based version, they can do so without compromise.
What the future looks like - and why we invested
Bonitasoft brings an innovative, high-quality, and extremely vital solution to a huge and dynamic marketplace. This fact alone would have been sufficient to justify the investment, but added to that is the Covid pandemic and its related effects, which highlighted the accelerated need for digital transformation and offers an extraordinary tailwind to a software company like Bonitasoft.
As teams have become more distributed, and customer expectations have continued to increase, customer experiences have become increasingly complex to manage. BPM has become a prerequisite for improving user experience across all channels and to drive innovation cycles for companies. This is true in fields as diverse as banking, healthcare, defence, telecommunications, and more.
Another important trend is robotic process automation (RPA), a technology aimed at substituting repetitive, mundane tasks with the help of robots. We believe in the complementarity of technologies such as RPA and BPM.
Because of its heritage and strong technology, Bonitasoft is well positioned to capitalise on the above trends. The company is already working on the next frontier, which is to extend the product to include functionalities in the field of process mining and process discovery. This will unlock the benefit of automation to an increasing number of business processes – even those a customer didn’t know existed.
Bonitasoft has never been afraid to go against the grain. By staying true to their mission, and not following the herd – for instance, by appealing to the technical people – they have proven themselves to be visionaries in their domain.
"It is clear that Bonitasoft understands how to maintain the balance between growth, profitability, and sustainability. This is an important quality we look for in our Growth PE partnerships."
- Simon Duyver, Fortino Capital
Despite never having parted ways with its entrepreneurial and visionary ethos, the company is an established industry player providing a strong, well-invested product, built by a loyal and capable team of domain experts. We remain impressed by the creativity of this team.
We look to forward to our ongoing relationship with Bonitasoft, partnering with them to accelerate their already strong market performance.
