BPM Market Heating Up, Metastorm Rising? - Page 2

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Metastorm offers modeling tools for EA, BPA and BPM and these support standards provided by OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) such as BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), Carter said.

The growth plan

In its recent report 'BPM Wave Human Centric Microsoft Platforms', Forrester said that Metastorm, together with Global 360 and Ultimus, take a comprehensive approach to business process management, satisfying every part of the process life cycle.

Metastorm is not just relying on technological advances to poise itself for the surge in demand for BPM; it's also planning an initial public offering (IPO) of common stock.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month, it said IPO proceeds could total $86.3 million, and plans to use the proceeds to expand its sales and marketing efforts and research and development capabilities; and for capital expenditures; general corporate purposes; possible acquisitions; and working capital.

Meanwhile, the big boys are looming on the horizon: SAP (NASDAQ:SAP) bought Business Objects and Indian software company Yasu Technologies last year; and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) snapped up BEA Systems, Inc, (NASDAQ:BEAS) whose products compete with SAP's NetWeaver.

At its SAPPHIRE 2008 conference held in Florida earlier this month, SAP announced that it will release SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management and SAP NetWeaver Business Rules Management to further augment the NetWeaver platform's BPM capabilities.