The latest 451 Open source strategy Spotlight was published last week with a focus on private cloud comouting software provider Intalio.

It is fascinating to observe how Intalio has evolved from being an open source specialist, operating a form of the dual licensing strategy, towards what we have referred to as an Open Inside model – building proprietary software products around open source software projects.

This is an evolution that The 451 Group had predicted we would see some open source specialists follow as they focused more on the complementary proprietary products and extensions, rather than the core open source projects.

What I found when I spoke to Intalio’s CEO Ismael Ghalimi was even more fascinating that I had appreciated, as it turns out that the company is operatiing a combination of Open Inside and open source specialist business strategies.

Previously best known as an open source business process management specialist, Intalio has made a series of acquisitions and altered its strategy to focus on offering a subscription-based (but not open source) private cloud software stack.

However, open source remains central to its strategy – not least the company’s original Business Process Management System (BPMS) software and Jetty, the lightweight Java server which was the focus of Webtide, which was acquired in August 2009.

The BPMS and Jetty businesses continue to operate as standalone entities and are required by the company to be profitable in their own right and employees of the BPMS and Jetty businesses are dedicated 100% to the projects unless they are contracted by Intalio’s Cloud group to contribute to Cloud products.

In terms of direct monetization of open source, Intalio offers training, consulting, support and custom integration for Jetty, as well as the associated CometD Web event routing bus, while operating a variation of the dual licensing model for BPMS.

Open source is integral to Intalio’s strategy beyond the company’s own open source assets, however. It would not have been economically possible for Intalio to assemble the portfolio of software packages that it has without being able to build on open source software, and the PaaS platform in particular (Intalio also offers SaaS and IaaS platforms) is based on the company’s ability to integrate multiple open source software packages.

The company’s various PaaS Application Engines are based on numerous open source projects including Jetty; Apache ODE; Drools Flow; JBoss Drools; JasperReports; Apache Camel; Nuxeo DM; Liferay; Funambol; and the Central Authentication Service project. Projects based on the Mondrian OLAP server; the Apache Cassandra distributed database; and the Gluster file system, are also in the works.

The Open source strategy Spotlight also includes details on how those various open source projects are and will be used by Intalio, as well as the company’s acquisition strategy, a look at how the dual licensing strategy for BPMS is shifting towards 100% open source, not to mention an overview of the Intalio Cloud stack.