After Talend and ExoPlatform, Bonitasoft gets ready to seduce the US market with its open source BPM solution

I’m not going to lie, Bonitasoft‘s success could probably give a lot of American entrepreneurs a run for their money. Based out of Grenoble, France, the 30-person team that specializes in open source business process management (BPM) solutions is on its way to becoming France’s next “open source star”, following in the footsteps of Talend and ExoPlatform. And after 8 years of R&D at INRIA (the French national institute for research in computer science), the company officially founded in June 2009 has announced that it is setting-up shop in the US just a few months after its first birthday – with offices in San Francisco and Boston.

According to CEO and co-founder, Miguel Valdès-Faura, the strategy of the company has been to target customers that are after something less expensive and more flexible than the solutions of bigger BMP players, like IBM-Lombardi, Oracle or Pega. Bonitasoft’s three-in-one product combines a process design studio, a BPM engine and a very simple user interface. Plus, the product also includes BMP simulation tools (for optimization of certain processes before deployment) and multi-tenancy and REST solutions to support cloud computing environments.

Today, the Bonitasoft Open Solution (launched in January) is downloaded more than 35,000 times per month (475,000 downloads to date), with one-third coming from the US market. Available for download under the GPL licence, Bonitasoft’s Java-based solution is immediately deployable and requires no coding by professional users. With some 70+ clients, the software suite is also used by one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world (I’ll let you guess which one…).

Not only is the company opening 2 US officed but it is also welcoming Dave Cloyd, Nuxeo’s former US Director, to the team. Cloyd will be responsible for the company’s operations out of Boston.

The company has raised 4 million euros to date with French VC-firms, Ventech and Auriga Partners. Plus, with Talend’s co-founder, Bertrand Diard, on the Board of Directors, I’d say Bonitasoft is off to a very promising start.