The tool, EA/Studio Community Edition is essentially a better replacement for the Visio or PowerPoint flow charts that database modelers are typically handed. The guiding notion is that as IT departments grow leaner and enterprises want to grow more agile, that specialists are being asked to become a bit more versatile and become more familiar with the core of the business.

Consequently, EA/Studio Community Edition is not going to give Pegasystems or IDS Scheer competition any time soon. It’s basically another weapon in the arsenal of data modelers and DBAs, who are Embarcadero’s core constituency. So it will focus on relatively simple workflow modeling, and by providing BPMN output, will enable database professionals to generate structured models that can be read by other BPM tools or by process execution and middleware platforms. In keeping with its simple mission in life, Embarcadero is not planning BPEL orchestration support at this point.

Deployment is another reflection of the specialized market that Embarcadero is serving. With Eclipse known as a platform for developers, most tool providers have chosen the plug-in model to the Eclipse IDE. However, Embarcadero’s client base is not, for the most part, developers, and so there’s no clamor for a development platform that's pretty unfamiliar to them. But on the other hand, Embarcadero wants to be consistent with its future releases, which means an Eclipse strategy. So they are putting the new BPM tool on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform to provide Eclipse compatibility, but not the classic look and feel of Eclipse.

Embarcadero’s strategy, which is providing the tool for free, is meant not to cultivate a new market, but to solidify its hold on an existing client base that's being asked to do more.

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