Yesterday Metastorm announced that it has been recognized as a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Business Process Management Suites, Q3 2010” report, published earlier this week.

In previous years, Forrester evaluated BPM suites across four categories and published four different BPMS Wave reports —document-centric, integration-centric, human-centric for Java and human-centric for .NET. Now, based on the evolving BPM landscape, Forrester focused down to one BPM Suite report, ultimately narrowing the playing field down to 11 global BPM vendors. I think this is a smart move – it is less confusing for organizations that are evaluating BPM, and it more accurately reflects the premise of BPM itself, which is that the strongest vendors handle human-centric, integration-centric and document-centric processes in a single BPM platform that ties together all types of disparate systems (Java, .NET, mainframe) under a single process layer.

BPM tools and solutions have prevailed through the recent economic downturn, offering business solutions to help boost productivity and gain efficiency and greater control over key operational processes. Whether the organizational objectives are to reduce cost, improve productivity, increase compliance, enhance business agility or reduce risk, Metastorm BPM provides a comprehensive, user-friendly, and proven BPM solution, enabling users to quickly design, automate, analyze, and monitor organizational processes.

But going beyond the basics, I was pleased that Forrester called out a few things that really make Metastorm innovative and stand out from the wealth of basic BPM solutions on the market. The evaluation states, “Metastorm falls into the Leader category, with an impressive collaborative process design environment and Web 2.0 features. [Metastorm] now offers innovative collaborative workspaces and Web-based modeling features that make their BPM suite more accessible to business analysts and business users.”

The newest generation of BPM suites have been designed to target a wide variety of users process analysts, process architects, end users, business managers, and customers—and offer deeper, richer features and capabilities to meet business needs. Forrester noted that BPM vendors are beginning to focus on greater inclusion and collaboration across nontraditional roles for business process improvement, including process owners, business users and customers. It is with no coincidence that our newest products, Metastorm M3 and Metastorm Smart Business Workspace, are aligned with this growing trend. Metastorm is committed to developing cutting-edge solutions that enhance collaboration, visibility and productivity across all levels of the organization.

Another differentiator for Metastorm is that we have long recognized the importance of delivering best-of-breed enterprise business architecture (EA), business process analysis (BPA) and business process management (BPM) technologies on a single platform – to help organizations tackle the ever elusive challenge of aligning strategy with execution. Metastorm has been one of the long-standing leaders in the BPM industry, but it is our unique ability to deliver full-scale EA and BPA software (which by the way is also ranked as a Leader in its category in the Forrester Wave for EA Tools, BPA and IT Planning report) integrated with our BPM suite that sets us apart from the pack.

Forrester acknowledges this differentiation in the report, stating “Metastorm was one of the first vendors to take advantage of the synergies between EA and BPM. Now that investment seems to be paying dividends by providing a compelling environment for BPM and EA teams to collaborate on strategy and delivery for business process improvement.” However, I don’t think the magnitude of this differentiator was fully reflected in our Wave position, due to the nature of the BPM-centric scoring criteria. Perhaps one day soon, industry analysts will acknowledge the importance of merging the EA, BPA and BPM disciplines onto an integrated technology set rather than viewing them solely as independent technologies. In the meantime, we continue to work with our customers to help them see the powerful potential of the combination and realize this vision.

I encourage you to read the complete Forrester BPM Suites Wave report, as well as other industry analyst reports, to get a clearer picture of the technology landscape and to learn more about how Metastorm Enterprise software solutions can be leveraged to meet your organizational needs.

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