Independent sources within the company confirm that key leaders of the Activiti team have just resigned from Alfresco Software. Despite rumors to the contrary, this was not a coordinated effort with the team leaving en masse–each of the three departing engineers are doing so independently, for their own reasons.

Activiti is an open source Business Process Management (BPM) system that can run independently as a standalone workflow engine. Alfresco embeds Activiti in its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform and offers commercial support for standalone Activiti under a product offering called “Alfresco Activiti”.

Whether it is run within Alfresco or as a standalone BPM engine, Activiti is a key technology that enables businesses to streamline processes that involve both humans and other enterprise systems. The departures are awful news for the company, which has been doing a lot of marketing around automating business processes in recent months.

Alfresco created Activiti as an open source project to replace jBPM, which, at the time, did not support the BPMN specification and was unwilling to modify their license to be compatible with Alfresco’s. Alfresco hired the jBPM creator and several members of that engineering team to create Activiti as a new BPMN-compliant, Apache-licensed engine from the ground, up.

The project has been popular and successful, both in its open source community and as a commercial offering, despite hitting a bump in the road in 2013 when some of the community members decided to fork the project.

What is clear is that the Activiti open source project will continue to move forward. The most likely scenario is that one or more of the departing engineers will continue to contribute to Activiti–they’ll just earn their income from another source. I suspect that Alfresco will continue its commercial push behind BPM and will continue to leverage Activiti as it does hundreds of other open source components.

A company always suffers for a while when a good person leaves. In this case several good people are leaving. I hope Alfresco can deal with this change and move forward successfully, and I’m looking forward to seeing what these talented engineers do next.