Business Process Management (BPM) specialist Metastorm has today announced the acquisition of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and process analytics software specialist Proforma in a deal that offers an insight into the future of the BPM market and the extent to which day-to-day business decisions could soon be made through automated systems.

Metastorm said that the acquisition of Proforma's ProVisionEA suite, which provides firms with visibility over their business strategy and organisational structures, will significantly extend the capabilities of its own BPM suite.

"A lot of BPM projects simply automate processes within a departmental silo without accounting for the impact on the rest of the business," admitted Laura Mooney, senior director of corporate and product marketing at Metastorm. "But once you have the EA piece you have an organisational diagram and you can apply the process modeling and management functionality across the business and work out the wider impact of changing a process."

Mike Thompson of analysts Butler Group agreed EA functionality would make BPM projects more far-reaching. "BPM has always been empowered by EA and adding that to a BPM and analytics suite should give Metastorm the ability to manage the entire process lifecycle," he said.

Metastorm said that it would offer some of this functionality immediately following the launch last year of a connector that integrates its BPM toolkit with Proforma's suites. However, Mooney said the company was now working on tightening integration further and was aiming to launch a new suite, called Metastorm Enterprise, early next year which would combine both companies' technology around a common meta-model, database and shared services repository.

"Having that common platform will enable end-to-end [process] visibility," she said. "It is also great for impact or opportunity assessment, allowing an executive to model a decision and get a view of the overall impact or opportunity to the business."

This level of analytical capabilities would also allow for guided or even automated decision making, according to Mooney, whereby the system works out the optimal decision based on the overriding business strategy and either automatically changes the process or offers executives the best options.

"It is the kind of functionality that would see a lot of interest from manufacturing, where there is so much focus on optimal processes for quality assurance, or in areas like emergency services or security where optimised decisions are so important," she predicted.

The Metastorm acquisition is the latest in a wave of deals or partnerships that have seen the fields of BPM, business intelligence and analytics gradually merge.

Metastorm's arch rival IDS Scheer has partnered with Oracle, SAP and Microsoft as each company works towards incorporating more process management and guided decision making capabilities into their applications, while a series of product developments and acquisitions from BI vendors such as SAS, Business Objects and Cognos have seen them bolster their analytics and process management functionality in an attempt to offer tools that can automatically optimise business performance.

"The whole BPM space is moving beyond rules management and towards decision management," commented Thompson. "Four to five years ago businesses may have resisted and argued gut instinct was better [for making decisions] but given the legislative climate and the pressure for firms to record process decisions and why they were made they are now more interested in this technology."