The business process management (BPM) tools market is on a solid growth path. BPM, which is designed to optimize and streamline business operations, will grow from the roughly $1 billion in 2007 to $2.6 billion by 2011 according to Gartner.
One of the vendors hoping to take advantage of this growth is Metastorm, which this week released an upgrade to its Metastorm BPM product and plans to unveil a unified enterprise platform later this year.
The upgrade includes a stronger partnership with Microsoft; process binding with Microsoft productivity applications such as Microsoft Office and Windows SharePoint; integration of Metastorm ProVision process analysis simulation elements within Metastorm BPM; inclusion of business activity monitoring (BAM) support and alerts in Windows Vista; and extended support for document management.
These steps will “make analytics something ordinary people can do, instead of an IT activity,” Greg Carter, Metastorm’s chief technology officer and vice president of product development, told InternetNews.com.
It is also the first of two steps towards a unified version of the company’s Metastorm Enterprise platform; the next will be creating a common facility for business process and enterprise architecture, Carter said.
Including SharePoint capabilities lets users collaborate and share their work without needing to go to a portal.
Metastorm BPM can build deployable applications that “constantly gather metrics and performance information and real world statistics,” and its latest release 7.6 lets users take that information and use it to create simulations, going beyond process analysis to process execution, Carter said.
Windows Vista will further increase ease of use because “we’ve taken advantage of some of the new Microsoft capabilities around providing ambient feedback, and are looking at the Windows desktop as an information source and not just something sitting in the background,” Carter added.
Vista provides the concept of a gadget which sits in the sidebar, and Metastorm has provided a series of gadgets that “let non-IT people deploy information in the sidebar so they can get information about the health of the processes they are taking part in,” Carter said.
For example, a user could see in the sidebar the number of new customer signups that take more than two hours, or the number of projects he is working on whose deadlines are coming up. “You don’t need to go to a specialized dashboard or portal to get your feedback, you just focus on doing your work,” Carter explained.
While Metastorm is using Windows as its delivery mechanism, it might look at alternatives such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Office Online applications and Google, Carter said.
Metastorm Enterprise, which will be launched later this year, will incorporate Metastorm’s enterprise architecture (EA); business process modeling and analysis (BPA); and BPM
“Users will employ models to describe complex things, whether it’s a business process or an organization; do things with these models; answer difficult questions such as ‘What happens if I retire my mainframe?’ ‘What are the systems and who are the people affected?,” Carter said.
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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.
