SOA and BPM convergence drives acquisitions

Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., also views this week’s acquisition as a move to strengthen the Metastorm presence in enterprise architecture, but is not sure how it will play in the SOA space.

“Metastorm has a strong focus in the BPM and BPA [business process automation] space, but they didn’t really have broad coverage in the EA and BPA/EA overlap area, which explains their acquisition of Proforma,” Bloomberg said. “This acquisition transitions them from being more of a runtime process management and modeling firm to more of process design and analysis firm, and potentially increases their applicability to emerging approaches such as SOA which demands greater understanding of business process and how it relates to composite services. However, neither company has had much of a presence in the SOA space, so it remains to be seen whether the combination will do any better.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Metastorm Merges With Proforma For Modeling

The driving engine for Metastorm Enterprise is the company’s own BPM engine. With it, customers will be able to build a unified business model, said Metastorm CTO Greg Carter.

“[The acquisition] addresses a question or a challenge that we saw in the market in that we wanted to more firmly tie the operational efficiency and execution that you achieved with Metastorm BPM with the strategic goals and methods of with a product like ProVision,” Carter told internetnews.com.

“It allows us to have a much broader reach in an organization.”

ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer agreed.

“This brings them more from being a runtime process management and modeling firm to more of process design and analysis, and increases their applicability to emerging approaches such as SOA, which demands greater understanding of business process and how it relates to composite services,” Schmelzer added.

Read more at: InternetNews

Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.

Service-Oriented Process

Business processes have always been an important, if understated, asset of enterprises. The nature and methods by which a company runs its business changes on a daily basis at various different levels in the company — from high-level strategic changes to lower-level implementation details. As a result of these changes, enterprises constantly struggle to make their businesses more responsive to business changes by connecting their business requirements to their IT and human capabilities.

However, automating business processes has historically been a difficult-to-achieve goal for most enterprises due to the flexibility of their IT infrastructure. Fortunately, businesses have a solution in Service-Oriented Process: a separate abstraction layer for business process definition and execution that leverages the capabilities of Service-oriented Architectures. Service-Oriented Process provides businesses an approach to tying business requirements to the Service model represented in the SOA metamodel, thereby providing a flexible approach towards implementing architectures that promote business agility.