Striving to break out of its niche of a niche market, Intalio is taking the next steps to fill out a best-of-breed offering, announcing a new partnership with open source content management provider Alfresco.

It’s the latest incarnation of a company whose earlier years were spent developing technology for a web services choreography standard (WSCI ) that went nowhere. But in its current life, the company has made impressive strides on growing a user and customer base, taking it from zero a couple years ago to 25,000 users across 300 active customers. Intalio has staked out an open source identity in a market not known for open source: BPM. In so doing it has carved a niche out of what is still a niche market: Gartner, Forrester, and IDC estimate the overall BPM market between $890 million to $1.7 billion, with expected growth to $5 – 6 billion by 2011.

But Intalio’s getting more ambitious – it’s obviously a niche provider in a market that, depending on your definition, includes modeling or stretches from modeling to execution. But like many BPM providers with aspirations to deployment and execution, it is striving to be the pivot point of an enterprise integration strategy. Through its best of breed strategy, Intalio is pitching itself as a more affordable alternative to BEA/Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP.

That’s a tall order. Alfresco is simply the latest piece in an open source best-of-breed strategy that also includes JBoss as the underlying middle tier server; JasperSoft, for BI reporting; Liferay, for portal; Talend, for ETL (data integration); Hyperic, for systems management; Diamelle, for identity and access management; and a choice of MuleSource, Apache ServiceMix, or WSO2 for enterprise service bus (ESB). Although a loose bundle (these are different products), Intalio will provide level 1 support.

Intalio is taking advantage of the fact that open source provides a lot of the building blocks through which an upstart can leapfrog years of development. For instance, it is utilizing the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), rather than developing its own modeler from scratch. Not surprisingly, it’s also using Eclipse to unify tooling, and it’s leveraging pieces of Equinox, the Eclipse’s umbrella project to apply the OSGi component model to run time. Intalio’s tentatively interested in Swordfish, the SOA runtime. But it is playing wait and see as the project has just gotten off the ground (and only has a single implementation), and most importantly, wants to make sure Swordfish will run with each of the ESBs that Intalio’s supporting.

Of course, the rap against best-of-breed is that it leaves the brunt of integration on the customer. Intalio claims to offer 10 points of integration, starting at API level, with a common installer, development tooling (all Eclipse-based), on a common appserver (JBoss) and repository (Intalio). Of course, this is all a work in progress; currently Intalio is furthest along with integration with JBoss, Alfresco, and Liferay, promising to complete the job with current partners by next year.

All told, Intalio is testing the proposition that open source and standards can enable a niche player pull off what other niche players haven’t: build a credible platform alternative to better-established incumbents. The closest parallel is with JBoss, which is also mounting a challenge via open source, but it’s doing so with a much broader-based platform of its own offerings covering much of the ground claimed by Intalio.

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