Cordys was founded in 2001 by ERP pioneer Jan Baan, who remains as Chairman and a major stockholder. Cordys launched its first product in 2004, and today has around 40 customers worldwide. After initially focusing on a few big customers, the company is now expanding and working to establish a larger global presence based on BPM firmly rooted in SOA, leveraging a $67 Million investment by Argonaut Private Equity in April 2007. Cordys today has around 550 employees, over half of which are in R&D. Cordys is headquartered in the Netherlands, with a large development facility in India and offices in the US, Europe, and China.
The company describes itself as a BPMS vendor that provides solutions in the following three domains: Business Process Management, Composite Application Framework, and Service Oriented Architecture, one of the few providers to bridge these historically distinct domains in a unified platform. By providing a single integrated toolset, Cordys promises shorter deployment cycles, more agile development, and improved scalability.
Cordys’s BPM suite layers process orchestration, human workflow, BAM, and business rules on top of service-oriented architecture, including an enterprise service bus (ESB) and tools for building and running transactional web services. Cordys makes explicit use of the ESB for loose coupling, performance scalability, and transaction recovery in business process implementations, while at the same time allowing non-programmers to compose those implementations graphically using BPMN. This helped Cordys attain the highest “completeness of vision” score in Gartner’s January 2006 magic quadrant for integrated service environments (CAF platforms).
Also, unlike many other BPMS offerings layered on SOA, Cordys offers a unified toolset built from the ground up on a single consistent architecture, rather than a collection of independent tools. The Cordys BPMS ships as a single product, installable from a single CD, with a single point of administration – all leading to lower cost of ownership. Also, all parts of Cordys are browser-based, from the design environment to human workflow to BAM.
