Exclusive Interview with Miguel Valdes Faura, CEO and Co-Founder, Bonitasoft

Digital process automation is bringing together people, applications, and information to build agile and digitized organizations. It enables the entire organization to digitize all their processes by creating a platform for engaging digital experiences for customers. Besides, enhanced innovations in domains like artificial intelligence and machine learning are some of the primary factors that have driven digital transformation in the industrial sector. Bonitasoft aims to prepare businesses for sustainable business process automation for enhanced growth and development. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Miguel Valdes Faura, the CEO and Co-Founder of Bonitasoft.

Some of the key highlights are mentioned as follows.  

Give a brief overview of the company background, its specialization, and its services.

Bonitasoft fully supports digital operations and modernization of information systems with Bonita, an open-source and extensible platform for automation and optimization of business processes. The Bonita platform accelerates development and production with a clear separation between visual programming and coding capabilities. Bonita integrates with existing information systems, orchestrates heterogeneous systems, and provides deep visibility across all enterprise processes. As reported in Crunchbase, Bonitasoft has garnered a total of US$27M Series C funding.  

Describe the disruptive innovation achieved by the company.

The Bonita digital process automation platform is fully open-sourced and specifically aimed to give multidisciplinary technical teams the widest possible set of tools to create process-based applications and automation projects. Extension points throughout the platform allow developers to connect to nearly any external IS, from legacy systems to modern API-exposing apps and platforms. This means that the technical team can fully integrate business applications with their company's unique enterprise IS stack.

Bonita's extensibility also allows developers to externalize some parts of the development using tools they prefer, which gives each developer freedom in how to implement Bonita-based applications. And at the same time, there is a portion of the Bonita platform (Bonita Studio) that offers low-code features (native ones, and also ones that can be developed and made available) so non-technical members of the project team can contribute to the essential business elements of the application or project: business data management, user interfaces/customer journey, reporting, and so on.

Bonita's most recent release (2022.1) also includes the most "integrable" Docker image on the market for an orchestrated platform deployment.

Explain how your innovation disrupts the existing market.

Over the years we recognized that business developers don't want to write code, and technical developers don't really like to use visual development environments. That doesn't mean that developers are not going to use, for example, a graphical editor to draw processes, but when code is involved – for example, the development of a connector to a legacy system that will be called from step 3 of a process – they want to use their own tools and frameworks rather than a provided developer view, a wizard or a pseudo-IDE in the graphical editor. This makes sense, people like what they like and are efficient with their preferred tools.

In a world where "low-code" is headed more and more towards "no-code," we think that developers are not being given enough consideration by many vendors. The majority of low-code platforms in the iBPMS market are focused on visual programming for citizen developers. This means that developers have limited freedom to code. For example, sometimes they may want to do some coding inside some graphical wizards in the platform; they may want to use SDKs but find that there are SDKs available only for a limited number of extension points, nothing beyond custom coding for connectors.

At Bonitasoft we aim to bring freedom to developers with a platform that includes more than 20 extension points for developers and the ability to externalize coding, test, and validation of those extensions before they are used in the platform. Should we call that low-code for developers? Maybe. 

Brief us about yourself and your contributions.

As the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Bonitasoft, I lead the company's mission: to bring powerful, affordable, open digital business automation to organizations and projects of all sizes. As the world's fastest-growing digital business platform provider, Bonitasoft has thousands of customers and an open-source community of more than 130,000 members.

Prior to Bonitasoft, I led R&D, pre-sales, and support for the BPM division of Bull Information Systems, a major European systems provider. I'm a thought leader in business process management and passionate about open-source community building.

Along with the other founders, we made a conscious decision to make open-source values – transparency, excellence, meritocracy, and collaboration – part of the company's DNA, and to ensure that an open-source version of the software would be available for anyone to download and use in production.

That way, anyone, anywhere would be able to take advantage of a BPM solution.

Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to-market strategy for the same?

We don't focus on a specific vertical. That being said we see a lot of traction in the following markets: banking, insurance, telecom, public sector, and pharma.

Bonitasoft was founded with the aim to democratize BPM technology worldwide. It was an opportunity to continue to develop and promote the Bonita open-source project created in 2001 that was getting more and more traction.

We decided to create a company in which open-source values would be part of our DNA: transparency, excellence, meritocracy, and collaboration and in which an open-source version of the software was available to anyone to download and use in production. That gives the opportunity to anyone, any company, to leverage a BPM solution.

Of course, as a private company, we needed to build a sustainable business model to ensure the development of the company (for employees, community users, customers, and partners). We decided to create a commercial edition of the software in which we bundled, in a subscription, a wide range of professional services (ie. support SLAs, personalized follow-up) and additional product capabilities (ie. clustering, monitoring) for companies looking for the most demanding production use cases and a strong partner to work with to guarantee the success of their deployments.

Over the last 13 years, the Bonita Community edition, the open-source edition of the software, has been at the same time something that makes us proud every day (as it has been downloaded millions of times and is used in production by thousands of organizations around the world) and also the starting point of Bonitasoft sales cycle. Indeed, a lot of customers have started adopting our technology by downloading and evaluating the Bonita open source edition, at their own pace, following Bonita Camp's free training courses, looking at the documentation, and discussing with other members of the community, and developing their first project.

At Bonitasoft, we really believe that open source, as a business model, is fair and sustainable. We commit to our community and customers to continue to work hard to make both open source and commercial editions better every single day.

What role is your company playing in helping organizations implement RPA?

We think about RPA as robots helping humans, the key actors in an automation project. The better the help, the more efficient the human/the task. RPA vendors are recognizing this and talking about "human in the loop." 

Application of AI tools (such as machine learning, process mining, predictive analytics, and so on) help humans find "invisible" inefficiencies, showing the way to make existing tasks, task sequences, or processes better.

But AI robots don't fix inefficiencies – people do. More intelligent robots simply don't make more intelligent processes, which those tasks are a part of.

Humans need to step back and look at the whole system to see where robots and AI can be deployed and how they better collaborate with humans to help make whole processes work better and faster.

Humans are the ones who bring innovation. People will deploy RPA and AI, together with BPM to create new products and new services that use automation – so it's people who drive innovation with automation, and not automation itself that brings innovation.

And further – we can't forget that humans are often the end-users of automation projects. How they will collaborate with robots, information systems, and other humans matters – to them. BPM technologies make this collaboration possible by enabling humans to be creative and innovate, and at the same time improve the collaboration among humans, robots, and systems.

What is your leadership mantra?

Have fun with Bonitasoft!

How do you see the company/industry in the future ahead?

I think nearly everyone in business today is aware of the importance of data analytics for business, to provide information useful for making solid business decisions, optimizing business operations, and so on. We're in an era of widely applied process automation too, with many years of experience in tools such as business process management automation (BPM) platforms and rapidly deepening experience in robotic process automation (RPA). 

Business data analytics and business process automation, taken together is what newly emerging process analytics is about: looking into process data to see what we can learn from it and how we can act on that knowledge. There is already a widely used process visualization standard with BPMN2.0 (Business Process Modeling and Notation), with a mature market ready for process analytics based on this standard.

I expect that we are going to see a rapid movement towards ways to visualize process data that will ultimately help business leaders to better understand what is going on with their processes and take appropriate action. We'll begin to see new technologies emerging in this area, and as innovation often comes from open-source development, that's where we should be watching.