Metastorm acquires Proforma Corp
On July 31st 2007, Metastorm announced the acquisition of Proforma Corporation, a provider of enterprise modelling solutions for Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Analysis (BPA). The combined company will deliver an integrated enterprise software platform that unifies business strategy and architecture, process analysis and optimization, and managed human- and system-centric process execution.
“Metastorm is proud to be joining forces with Proforma to move beyond today’s Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) definition and chart a new course for enterprise effectiveness through increased collaboration, agility, and understanding. Organizations today are striving to improve performance through EA, BPA and BPM initiatives. The synergies, interdependencies, and potential value of these three disciplines are immense, and now is the right time for Proforma and Metastorm to join forces and deliver an integrated software platform,” stated Bob Farrell, president and CEO of Metastorm.
“Proforma has built a strong market presence based on its ability to deliver powerful enterprise architecture, modelling and analysis capabilities that are also intuitive and usable by multiple people within an organization—from architects to business analysts to Six Sigma Blackbelts,” stated Ron Pellegrino, president and CEO of Proforma. “We have had a long-standing vision of completing the business optimization cycle by combining our market-leading strategy and analysis tools with rich process deployment and execution capabilities. We have collaborated with Metastorm at mutual customers seeking both enterprise modelling and process execution and have witnessed the increased sense of urgency to unify these technologies. By joining forces now, we will be the first to deliver this unification.”
Metastorm Enterprise—the new software platform—allows customers to establish a unified enterprise model which can be leveraged to inspire collaboration, guide improvement and innovation, and enable the alignment of strategy, analysis and execution for optimal business performance throughout the enterprise. Metastorm claim that Metastorm Enterprise will uniquely address the three critical challenges facing organizations today:
- Understanding the underlying dynamics of the organization, collaborating to ensure the pieces fit together, and creating agility within the context of overall enterprise strategy and architecture.
- Mapping out an end state that maximizes the effectiveness of key business processes, intertwined with other enterprise assets, to achieve strategic objectives.
- Executing optimized, effective business processes with cross-functional transparency and the flexibility to adapt and implement new ideas quickly.
The Metastorm Enterprise portfolio includes:
- Metastorm ProVisionEA: A solution for Enterprise Architecture and organizational context—allowing customers to translate business strategy and operational objectives into effective enterprise change through models that describe enterprise assets, relationships and future state.
- Metastorm ProVisionBPA: A suite for Business Process Analysis that enables architects and analysts to document, analyze and streamline complex processes using sophisticated modelling, simulation, Six Sigma and other optimization methods.
- Metastorm BPM: A Business Process Management Suite for roundtrip process life-cycle management—including design, automation, analysis, and monitoring of an organization’s human- and system-centric activities and processes.
Metastorm will offer each solution independently or as an integrated Metastorm Enterprise platform based on an evolving common meta-model and set of shared services. Metastorm will continue to leverage the ProVision Common Interchange Format (CIF) interface.
This is quite a combination with both products having had good reviews from my colleagues in the analyst community. It will be interesting to see the impact of this announcement on Metastorm’s competitor. I for one will be watching with interest.