Intalio (a company funded by 3i, Cargill, Woodside Fund, SAP Ventures, et. al.) has acquired my former employer, FiveSight Technologies, a manufacturer of one of the highest (if not the highest) quality business process execution language (BPEL) engines the world has ever seen. eWeek reports on it here. Congrats to the team of companies as they enter a new era. Maciej Szefler, formerly chief architect for FiveSight, takes over as chief architect for Intalio. FiveSight had some of the smartest guys (excluding myself) in the world working for it, and I thought I would take a moment to congratulate them, in particular founders, Paul Brown, Maciej Szefler, and Justin Guinney. I’d also like to thank the three of them for letting me join the team.
I thought I’d take a moment to reflect upon one aspect of FiveSight in its life as a startup. Perhaps it will shed some light on the fluid nature of the startup environment.
I joined FiveSight at the end of 2000 (close to concurrent with its seed round of funding) before we had offices, and I was the first non-programmer (aka business guy) to join the company. The company had a concentration in automating business processes using low-level, highly technical infrastructure and had a few clients exclusively in the healthcare space. The product that was sold was in the integration space, sort of like a toolkit, and it was *not* the product that was sold as part of FiveSight to Intalio. The standards around BPEL were not that well-formed around the time we were in that original business. We raised corporate venture capital (pre-BPEL) through Union Pacific Corporation (NYSE:UNP) and got some big name clients with our first product, such as Nomura and Hitachi in Japan, and Harley-Davidson. Probably the accomplishment of which I am most proud at FiveSight was locating a prospect (by cold calling them from a magazine article), selling our first enterprise deal into an industry sector where we had no references, and then negotiating and facilitating the venture funding with Paul. It is very hard to line up deals when you have no customer references, no brand name to speak of, no venture capital or big financial backer, and when you need to compete against brand name, larger firms.
To make a long story very short, the first product that we got out the door, served as FiveSight’s experience and drove a lot of the intellectual property that went into the BPEL engine now owned by Intalio. When we started the journey, we did not know we would wind up with a new product. But we listened to customers and the market. We also did not know how the proprietary versus open source playing field was going to pan out. FiveSight managed to focus on the shifting landscape. We went with proprietary until it made sense. While doing all of the basic blocking and tackling associated with near-term sales and startups, we also had to focus on the larger picture as to how the industry was shifting.
I left FiveSight at the end of 2004 due to a relocation from Chicago to Dallas (as my wife finished her PhD). To this day it is still hard to keep someone part of core management if they are not within HQ.
Open source is here, and with FiveSight, Intalio is even more at the forefront of a class of products provided via that means. Technology aside, Intalio got some of the smartest guys I have ever worked with. They are and will continue to be legendary.
Disclosure: I am an investor in Intalio and formerly part of the management team of FiveSight.
Update (12/8/05): Paul has some additional experiences to share here. Paul, thanks for the kind words.