Lubor Ptacek comments on the Global 360 acquisition on his blog:

With the combination of Metastorm and Global 360, we are now the largest provider of BPM solutions for the Microsoft ecosystem. The BPM solutions complement our existing information governance and archiving solutions for SharePoint and Exchange. But what’s more important, Global 360 increases the critical mass of process management focus inside of OpenText.

(I didn’t know anyone was still blogging on blogger…)

Being the biggest Microsoft BPM partner is sort of like being the biggest Microsoft Cloud partner.  There are bigger players in both markets, with more traction, momentum, and ecosystems.  But being the biggest in the Microsoft ecosystem is probably better than not being the biggest.

Lubor continues:

The Global 360 acquisition is unique, though, as it allows OpenText to not only expand its offerings, but also reach a critical mass needed to establish itself as a serious contender in a new market. This is not a minor matter.

I think this is the key point.  The ECM vendors need the BPM market to revitalize their growth and increase their addressable markets.  It isn’t a bad thing to be strong in both content and process.  Of course, this isn’t just three companies, OpenText + MetaStorm + Global 360.  MetaStorm and Global 360 each had acquired several companies as well, so this is a roll-up of roll-ups and integration challenges are going to be many and diverse.  The interesting questions will be about a year from now-  what is the roadmap for BPM at OpenText, the roadmap for innovation, etc.

Forrester has a quick summary of the acquisition as well:

OpenText is at it again — and another independent BPM provider is gone. This time it’s Global 360. But Global 360 was more than BPM; it had done a good — no, great — job revitalizing what was at its core an ECM rollup of midrange and questionable solutions (remember Kodak, Keyfile — I actually met an original Keyfile developer there — and ViewStar?). But it nurtured this account base well and  built a fast-growing BPM and case management business. It’s now been purchased by the ultimate ECM rollup, OpenText.

Craig Le Clair’s article emphasizes even further what a monumental integration challenge this will be.

I was surprised the OpenText acquisition of Metastorm didn’t garner a little more attention in the press.  It certainly got less airplay than the acquisitions of Lombardi and Savvion received last year.  Maybe it is just a sign of how busy things are for the people who cover the space.

MWD recently published their take on the acquisition:

OpenText is no stranger to acquisitions, of course – its 2009 acquisition of Vignette being the most high-profile to date. But with key competitors IBM and Oracle now very firmly in the BPM game and pushing forward with investments to combine ECM and BPM capabilities for case management applications, it’s no surprise that OpenText would be on the lookout for a suitable BPM tools vendor.

That’s about how it reads to me, too.

OpenText is buying Metastorm.  As soon as I saw this announcement, I could guess what transpired.  At first glance, Metastorm has some assets that don’t really fit with the OpenText direction as I’ve understood it (in the recent past, OpenText bought Vignette, formerly a content management powerhouse in Austin).

But if you follow the content management space, you might be aware that in general, the ECM vendors are targeting BPM as a way to stay relevant to their IT and Business buyers.  It is about wallet-share and mind-share.  But there’s more than just the general trend, there are specific data points to look at:

• IBM bought Filenet, along with a BPM software vendor (Lombardi, our coverage under the link).
• EMC owns Documentum. I‘m not aware of a BPM product in their portfolio, but now that all the content management companies seem to be paired up with bigger vendors, it creates some pressure on the remaining players in the space. Looks like they have their own BPMS as well.
• Alfresco has sponsored the Activiti project – an open source BPMS, started by the leaders of the jBPM effort, which has been getting traction and is already in GA.  Activiti is already a key to Alfresco’s value proposition.

I think OpenText was feeling a need to round out its portfolio and the options in the BPM world are a bit more limited than they were a few years ago.  Metastorm has some good product assets, however, and I expect OpenText will find new ways to leverage them, and it will help them stay relevant.

As a BPM services vendor – we see a lot of BPM projects that involve documents, and managing processes relating to key documentation assets.  There’s clearly an overlap at a project or solution level.  But I have to admit I liked the more old-school approach of having clean implementation and interfaces for document management systems, rather than baking the two products into a single offering with a more “UI-driven” integration.  Having said that, the UI-driven integration of ECM and BPM is clearly going to make it easier to build hybrid process solutions.

Side Note:  I can see BPM capabilities being rolled into other products in other horizontal and vertical niches, and improving the value proposition of those products.  That future is coming.

So the new Forrester Wave is out.  What’s that? you hadn’t heard?  If not, you haven’t talked to anyone in the analyst or BPM vendor community in the last 24 hours!

As usual, there are a raft-load of vendors declaring victory:

Appian: “Appian Still Leading the Pack”

Pega:  “Pegasystems ranked #1 as one of two BPM vendors that ‘lead the pack with the best overall combination of modeling, design and development features for business and technical roles driving process improvement’ “  (bonus, their article includes the image of the Wave graphic itself)

Metastorm: “Metastorm Recognized as a Leader in Business Process Management Suites Report…”

IBM has several congratulatory tweets about being in the leader quadrant, but I haven’t seen a press release yet.

Judging by the wave, I should be able to add links to Progress and Software AG press releases or blog posts by this time tomorrow.

Every one of these vendors will crow that the analysts have confirmed that they’re as smart as they thought they were – that they’re leaders (or even, “number 1″).

So, I’ll let you in on a little secret.  The Wave won’t tell you which BPMS makes the most sense for you.  Some of these offerings are actually so different that they rarely, if ever, compete for the same customer projects, and often corporations own more than one product because they aren’t viewed as doing the same thing.  For example, Appian’s strength in SaaS means that will compete more often for SaaS deployments – the decision “to SaaS or not to SaaS” was probably made before any vendors were called.   Metastorm’s strength in EA may play well with customers who are doing a lot of modeling, but for projects that are more focused on implementation, or who already own other EA tools, that offering won’t be as compelling as something more targeted at executing processes.  Even Pega (apparently depicted as #1 on the Wave), isn’t as often in competition for general-purpose BPM platform purchases – they tend to be in the finals for more vertical processes, where their investment in specific templates or verticals or applications can really pay off.  A friend once described Pega as more a company that sells rules- and BPM- enabled applications, rather than BPM itself (it wasn’t a criticism, my friend thought it was good strategy for the company).

Of course the meat of these things is in the written words inside the report, but it is hard to get there when there is that tasty graphic that everyone can look at.  I wonder what would happen if Forrester withheld the scoring and the graphic for a couple of weeks, and just revealed the more in-depth analysis.  Another interesting data point would be the number of times (that Forrester can determine) any two vendors were finalists in the same evaluation – which would allow for a 2×2 grid/heatmap that shows you who is competing with whom.  I was happy to see Forrester give up on separating BPM into various different flavors of BPM – that approach never really worked for me, personally.

So everyone is happy now.  But in the morning, we’ll humbly get back to work and get some processes built and deployed, and improve some processes.  Which is, after all, the whole point of BPM.

Update: as expected, a few announcements today:

Software AG announces their leadership status here.

And Progress’ blog entry can be found here.

Sandy has a good review of Metastorm’s M3 offering on her blog, posted on 7/30/2010. From her review, it sounds like Metastorm is focused on a Microsoft-platform strategy (Azure), which at this point is mostly collaborative business modeling, but as Azure matures, they plan to move the BPM engine to Azure as well.  Sandy compares the model types favorably to IBM’s BPM Blueworks.

I’m not sure that basing strategy on the Microsoft stack is ideal, but someone has to win the BPM space on their platform.  I think the more interesting integration with the Microsoft stack is actually on the desktop (an approach some other BPM vendors take).  The review is another sign that collaborative BPM modeling is becoming common – some might say commoditized.