Seems Christmas has come all at once for open source BPM, two posts within a week on Redux 
Red Hat announced yesterday that it has acquired Polymita’s BPMS technology* to consolidate it’s foothold in the BPM market.
The acquired Polymita technology brings complementary BPM capabilities that are designed to improve the productivity of business users. The combination of JBoss Enterprise BRMS with Polymita technology helps position Red Hat as a leading vendor in the BPM marketplace.
I reviewed Polymita in 2010 after a rather clumsy approach by one of their new hires to leverage my contact base (an ex-analyst from my favourite firm no less) and found it comprehensive enough but their market grip was sadly lacking outside of their native Spanish territory and they dropped off my radar since. Unlike AuraPortal who I looked at as their direct local rival they didn’t really flourish. It’s now interesting that Red Hat has bought their technology because they obviously see it adding strength to their already existing jBoss BPMS as well as take on the open source challenge to the front line.
Maybe this is what the industry needs, a bit more of a direct in-your-face approach from the OSS crowd rather than take the market by stealth.
Red Hat says that key components of Polymita will be made open source and added to the jBoss community and makes some noise about it’s Cloud based capabilities. It’s true that Polymita made use of the Ekuar Cloud BPM solution to deploy to Cloud so this should accelerate Red Hat’s plans somewhat.
It’ll be interesting to see what the roadmap looks like from Red Hat as well as how customers react to the acquisition and whether they continue to maintain their existing implementations or move elsewhere.
* lots of mention of the technology, but not the company itself…..in fact the entire Polymita website has been shut down…..
Footnote: It’s funny that Polymita is also a type of large land snail. Which is kind of fitting in its former approach to marketing its product and its ability to grab market share.
