So earlier this year someone packaged up the open source Drools BRMS and added one of the more uninspiring industry BPM products and sold it to Progress for $49 million, who are calling it Savvion BRMS, otherwise known as “A Bridge in Brooklyn”.
Progress already have a failing strategy with Open Source, pumping millions into acquiring open source projects and communities only to then have no idea what to do with them and then dump them almost as rapidly. The ripping off of Drools and selling it as their own, only shows even deeper levels of desparations and incompetence, with no ability to innovate on their own.
Progress has never contributed a single line of code to Drools, they are not involved in the community process or have any real insight or involvement of the road map and future developments.
Shame on you Progress you represent some of the worst predatory practices in the open source industry. Not only have you ripped off the hard work of many people, some dedicating their lives to making Drools a success. You then shamelessly pass it off as your own misleading your paying customers who have no idea that you are flogging them an out dated version of a freely available open source project, that you can’t even really offer proper support for.
I don’t think Progress really thought this through, or under stood what Drools is or where it is going, as it complicates their portfolio and they’ll have no ability to bring in the latest Drools innovations while keeping their portfolio sane. Or maybe that’s the plan, they realise their own tech stack is pants and looking for Drools to provide their future BPMN2 and CEP solutions, and are just slowly phasing it in so not to alarm customers who are investing in their soon to be deprecated products.
Progress has a CEP product and Drools Fusion does CEP. Savvion provides BPM software, yet Drools now does BPMN2. These things are tightly integrated with Drools, if they attempt to remove them or hide them, they are then just selling the customers crippleware. Why would someone buy that, when they can get the real deal from Red Hat, who can actually provide support they can stand behind. This is only going to get worse for them, as we are investing further in these technologies providing even greater value via deeper integration, all of which will be leveraged for our grid solution in delivering Drools in the cloud. Any customers using Savvion BRMS are going to feel like someone has delivered them a Porsche, but when they take it for a spin they find out it’s got the engine of a three wheeled Robin Reliant in it.
Well done Progress, you’d make Del Boy Trotter proud. You Plonkers!.
To organisations that are still tempted by Savvion BRMS, why not invite me along to the sales call. I’ll be more than happy to interview their support team and engineers with a few choice questions to see if they can actually support what they are selling you.
Mark
Drools Co-Creator and Lead
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Follow up blogs:
Breaking news… Have your vote on what the Drools community should do with it’s 30% of the Savvion $49mill Sale
Breaking news… Progress and Savvion steal candy from a baby!!!
