IntalioCloud takes on Salesforce.com

May 19, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

Intalio, a private company that until now has been focused on providing open source systems for business process management (BPM), is launching a more ambitious product called IntalioCloud. With a combination of BPM and customer relationship management (CRM) tools for salespeople, Intalio is challenging Salesforce.com, the company that built its reputation on selling CRM services via online subscription (and which has more than 50,000 customers).

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Intalio isn’t ducking from the comparison, either. Its press materials include the slogan “No Limits,” a variation on Salesforce’s “No Software.” Intalio says there are three key differences. First, Salesforce is all about hosting the applications and data on its own servers, but Intalio offers several options — an offering hosted by Intalio, an offering that resides on a customer’s hardware, and a product built on Intalio hardware and maintained by Intalio, but hosted in the customer’s data center. (The idea is to provide the flexibility and low-cost of software hosted in the Internet cloud, but also offer additional security and control via a “private cloud” to those who want it.)

Second, business applications developed for use in Salesforce’s platform have to use the company’s proprietary programming language, while IntalioCloud is open to many languages such as JavaScript and Ruby. Third, Intalio says it provides 25 gigabytes of data storage per account, much more than Salesforce.

To put the new product together, Intalio just announced the acquisition of CodeGlide, a software company based in Buenos Aires, Argentina that developed CRM software, and ProcessSquare, a Munich, Germany-based company that developed a web service for BPM. The terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Intalio has been around for a decade, about the same amount of time as Salesforce. It has raised $42 million venture capital and currently has more than 500 customers.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • It seems to me that SugarCRM has a somewhat similar model with only mild success. It will be interesting to see the pricing models for Intalio as currently the Salesforce subscription costs seem like a strain for smaller-mid-sized customers.

    In regards to the file storage issue; this is another true pain with the salesforce customer base which we ourselves, are attempting to solve.

    Edwin
    http://www.cloudize.net
  • Lot's of competitors. Very few that pull off the upset. If they've been around as long as Salesforce they better figure out how to improve their marketing. 500 customers is a far cry from 50,000 customers.
  • Ian,

    Salesforce.com started selling their CRM system 10 years ago. We started yesterday. Our original product was a BPM platform, and there are over 50,000 organizations around the world using the free version, and 500 paying customers for the commercial one. BPM is much harder to sell than CRM, so it will be interesting to see how the combination of both performs on the marketplace.

    Stay tuned!

    Best regards
    -Ismael