Metastorm Acquires Proforma Corporation, Seeks to Unify Process Execution and Architecture

08/01/2007

Metastorm, a provider of Business Process Management (BPM) software for organizational agility, innovation, and governance, today announced the acquisition of Proforma Corporation, a provider of enterprise modeling solutions for Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Analysis (BPA).

ebizQ received the following:

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 will address the complete spectrum of activities required to achieve enterprise alignment, optimize execution across the business process value chain and help organizations gain a sustainable strategic advantage through true enterprise visibility and continuous improvement.

“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. “Metastorm has always focused on delivering innovative solutions that allow organizations to achieve strategic and competitive advantage across key business activities and processes. With the convergence of these disciplines, Metastorm sets the stage for the next generation enterprise software platform.”

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. The result is never before achieved visibility into the impact of decisions at all levels, the opportunities available to the organization as a whole, and the ability to accelerate the execution of decisions and actions with less risk and increased confidence of success. 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.

“Linkage to the workflow assembly and orchestration engines and business activity monitoring (BAM) tools is driving BPA into the mainstream for BP improvement initiatives. Understanding complex business processes is a significant challenge. The assistance of a tool with visualization and other features — such as simulation and activity-based costing (ABC) — helps to optimize business processes and realize BPM cost and time savings,” states Michael Blechar, vice president at Gartner, Inc. in his June 2007 report titled Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis Tools, 2H07-1H08.

In addition, “BPA tools help define the business architecture portion of the enterprise architecture. Many BPA tools can also be used by technical, application and data architects to define the technical and information architectures. And, because most BPA tools have a shared repository for these models, it is possible to do change impact analysis across organizations and roles based on the inter-relationships of their models.”

Proforma is known for delivering a balanced solution that meets the needs of multiple modeling roles within an organization. It delivers a robust knowledgebase of reference models based on published standards, industry expertise and practical experience. Proforma has one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the EA and BPA markets because it is easy to use, bridges the gap between IT architects and business users, and provides a proven set of repeatable best practice frameworks.

“Proforma has built a strong market presence based on its ability to deliver powerful enterprise architecture, modeling 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 modeling 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.”

The Metastorm Enterprise portfolio is a unique set of integrated, state of the art offerings that enable visibility across the enterprise and close the gaps between enterprise strategy and architecture, analysis, and execution. It includes:

• Metastorm ProVisionEA – A complete 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 robust suite for Business Process Analysis that enables architects and analysts to document, analyze and streamline complex processes using sophisticated modeling, simulation, Six Sigma and other optimization methods.



• Metastorm BPM – A complete 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.

Each product has been recognized by industry analysts as a leading solution in its respective market based on the ability to meet a complete set of complex business and IT requirements. 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 and other industry interoperability standards to enable integration with existing IT investments in applications, legacy systems, and other technologies and to give customers the flexibility to leverage any Metastorm product with third-party software and technologies of choice.

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