Ten months after acquiring rival CommerceQuest, business process management (BPM) software specialist Metastorm has launched its first fully integrated suite combining functionality from both brands.

Greg Carter, CTO and vice-president of product development at the company, said Metastorm BPM Version 7 combines Metastorm’s capability to design, model and manage human-based business processes, with CommerceQuest’s system-based BPM functionality. “It bridges the gap between the processes run by IT that rarely touch the end-user and the processes handled by people and allows firm to manage a process through its lifecycle using a single user interface,” he added.

For example, the technology could be used to manage the IT processes required to extract transactional information from payment systems and integrate that information with human-based processes such as pricing promotions, so that when inventory gets too high price cuts are recommended, said Carter.

The suite also boasts improved integration with service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments; a new process management client, designed to operate through a Microsoft SharePoint Portal; and extended event management functionality that allows companies to more easily push event notifications out to their end-users by using RSS feeds and other communication technologies.

“We’ve redesigned the framework so users can be more easily notified,” said Carter. “Some BPM products are quite proprietary when it comes to event notification, but we’re keeping it as open as possible so the suite can integrate with different types of devices and technologies that let people know what is happening with a process. We’d like to see the industry become more standards-based in this area.”

The new suite was welcomed by Mike Thompson of analyst firm Butler Group, who said the acquisition of CommerceQuest and rapid integration of the two technol ogies meant Metastorm was better placed to cope with the growing competition from infrastructure vendors such as IBM and BEA.

Thompson added that there is increasing demand for BPM systems as firms move from pilot projects to enterprise-wide deployments. “Implemented correctly, BPM helps firms become far more responsive,” he said. “BPM functionality is also likely to prove very useful in limiting project creep in the application development environment.”