This makes Metastorm M3 the only enterprise-class business planning & modeling solution offered on the Azure Marketplace. M3 offers the most popular modeling types from Metastorm’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Management (BPM) software and delivers them anywhere, anytime in a secure, easy to use environment – enabling real-time collaboration, annotation and recording capabilities in the cloud.

With a $0 investment in new software or infrastructure, both business and IT staff of any experience level can get involved in the design process and collaborate across different departments. For greater business improvements, you’ll want to take modeling even further and identify relationships between key business and process components of your organization.  So anything that your teams build in M3 can be uploaded into Metastorm ProVision as part of a larger EA or business transformation project or exported into Metastorm BPM for automation.

This certification as part of the Windows Azure Marketplace is the latest in OpenText Metastorm’s credentials. As a Gold Certified Partner in the Microsoft Partner Network, OpenText Metastorm leverages Microsoft Silverlight for its user interface, and offers integration with the Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Workflow Foundation and Microsoft Visual Studio. For additional information, check out M3 here in the Windows Azure Marketplace.

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With emerging Cloud technologies and some creative thinking on the part of organizational leaders, this paradigm could shift – and organizations could suddenly discover that the people who understand the day-to-day workings of the business are now able to contribute their knowledge and insights into everything from strategy to process improvement.

More than the technology – the Cloud brings a real opportunity to broaden the reach of process participants and consumers of business models. Successful cloud and SaaS-based applications bring more than a new delivery method. They also bring self provisioning and management, online guidance, simplified user interfaces, and integration with other cloud-based tools like social computing.  All of this adds up to the potential to harness the power of the collective knowledge of the organization in ways not possible or practical in the past.

Take business modeling as an example.  Within our customer base, we have found that our Cloud modeling tool (Metastorm M3) is enabling business people who have not been engaged in enterprise modeling in the past to create, reference, maintain, and share all kinds of models – strategy, rule, organization, process, etc. – with no technology installation and virtually no training. We are seeing spontaneously formed crowds of business people capturing models, sharing them with their colleagues, and then using the resulting models to communicate issues, changes, and recommendations to management, business architects, and even IT.

The key to uptake and broad appeal is leveraging the patterns of Cloud services and providing sufficient breadth in the types of models people can capture, while simplifying the approach. Each day, people capture high level activity and process models – and even more create organization charts, location maps, and goal hierarchies.

Crowd-based modeling in the Cloud is becoming a powerful discovery tool and can be an important way for business and enterprise architects to leverage the tacit knowledge spread throughout an organization – and more importantly for senior executives to get more insights into the realities of what is going on in the business. Since any credible cloud-based modeling tool will also support bi-directional integration with full-scale enterprise architecture and BPM tools, business architects and enterprise planners can seed a baseline of work by providing customized guidance, template models, and pre-configured building blocks for crowds to use. Organization structures, corporate goals, and measurements are all good examples of crowd-enabling building blocks.

Just as models build relationships between the different moving pieces in our organizations, the patterns and technologies of social computing build relationships among our crowd modelers.

Social computing was one of the first capabilities and services offered by the Cloud and embodies all the traits of cloud computing. Collaboration is one of the best examples of how social networking can be applied in a business situation, and it is a key component in any valid cloud-based modeling platform –allowing real-time, multi-user modeling sessions with requirements capture and in-context discussion, collaboration turns modeling into a multi-way knowledge sharing session amongst the crowd.  Subject matter experts on the business side learn more about the art of capturing their world in models, and business architects and analysts learn more about the how the organization is shaped and operating.

While collaboration breathes new energy into modeling sessions, the tie to BPM tools gives us the power to bring our models to life.  Combine BPM execution with cloud-based modeling and visibility and you have a closed loop feedback mechanism that gives people at all levels of an organization access to processes and process information, complete execution, and the real-time feedback on business operations that comes with it.

We have customers who create hundreds of models every day and provide view-only access to these models to thousands of people.  Many of these models become executable applications, either through BPM or custom development.  With the Cloud, more people can now leverage the context-rich information that is being captured by the BPM system and fed back to the goals, strategies and assumptions that drive process design.  With the instant access that cloud modeling and collaboration provides, the degree of participation and decision-making is suddenly advanced from view-only to a rich, real-time operational tool that delivers greater insight, control and agility.   

The power of crowds in the Cloud has the potential to transform the ways organizations operate and finally deliver on the promise of continuous improvement. Learn more about Metastorm M3 and Metastorm Enterprise applications at www.metastorm.com.

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Operating on the Microsoft Windows Azure ™ platform, Metastorm M3 provides users with complete benefits of a private or public cloud, including scalability, performance, security, and elasticity.  Metastorm M3 is designed to be modeling for the masses, offering 11 different modeling types—goal, organization, capability, system, process/workflow, activity, rule, project, requirement, location and deliverable— from the Metastorm Enterprise software suite.  Additionally, Metastorm M3 provides 23 modeling objects and viewpoints, going beyond a traditional process model, to give users more comprehensive and holistic business improvements. 

Metastorm M3 empowers businesses by offering a cloud-based environment through which an unlimited number of users can easily improve their organizations using enterprise modeling and collaboration.  Business and IT users are given a rich, social environment in the Cloud where they are able to utilize social networking tools such as chat, whiteboard, model annotation, sharing, recording, and playback to design and implement business practices.  A distinguishing feature of Metastorm M3 is that it offers secure, cloud-based collaborative enterprise modeling for anyone, anywhere.  Metastorm M3 is an excellent tool for mass deployment because it offers built-in modeling guides and real-time help, requiring no prior knowledge of or training in enterprise modeling and no IT setup.  Additionally, its location in the Cloud allows users to gain unlimited access, opening a broader, global collaboration for businesses to achieve the most optimal results.

Metastorm M3 is designed to be used alone or with the Metastorm Enterprise software suite.  Any input, information and data captured in the Cloud is compatible with Metastorm’s enterprise architecture, business process analysis, business process management and integration products to ensure ongoing, shared visibility and the ability to incorporate user input enterprise-wide process improvements.

“Metastorm M3 is designed to go above and beyond any other tool available today to give our customers a distinct edge over their competition,” said Greg Carter, executive vice president of development and CTO of Metastorm.  “Leveraging our years of best practice experience in modeling, architecture strategy and process improvement, we have compiled a rich set of modeling and collaboration tools to empower users on a global scale to participate in business architecture and process definition activities that were once limited to a specific department or skill level.”

What to know more about Metastorm M3?  Check out the social media version of the press release here, complete with screenshots and other related materials.

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