Providing yet another option for collecting data for simulating new business processes, BPM (Business Process Management) provider Metastorm announced that it is buying Spotlight Data, a 6-person startup that already has blue chip clients in the insurance industry. The price of the acquisition was undisclosed, reflecting the tiny size of the acquired operation.

Spotlight Data provides an add-in for people or systems to enter data on how processes are executed. “Spotlight offers a process discovery capability on the front side of simulation,” said Bob Farrell, Metastorm CEO. For instance, a claims agent for an insurer would enter data on how long it took to complete the process. Or the claims processing system could automatically feed similar data by registering start and end times for the process step.

Because it is an add-in, its tool would not normally be used in everyday operation as users would probably find the extra data input screen intrusive. Furthermore, Metastorm already has process real-time feedback capabilities built into its existing process execution engine, so the new capabilities would presumably be used for processes not yet automated by Metastorm.

This marks the third acquisition this year for Metastorm, which is currently extending its footprint across the BPM life cycle. Because the company initially lacked a board based organizational process modeling capability, it was long known as a departmental or operating unit, rather than an enterprise BPM system. Or it could be used for automating a specified process across organizational boundaries.

The stage was first set with the 2005 acquisition of CommerceQuest, which doubled the company’s market footprint to over 1200 customers. This year, the company has gone for acquisitions that deepened its product portfolio. In buying Proforma back in August, it gained the enterprise process modeling capability that it was lacking. More to the point, Metastorm made the unusual leap of adding an enterprise architecture offering to BPM – viewing EA as more of a business process, rather than an IT architecture problem. To drive the point home, Metastorm followed that acquisition last month with the acquisition of Process Competence, a Proforma reseller based in the Benelux countries that also had extensive insurance domain expertise.

So where does this all lead? The obvious answer is that the company is next going to stitch the pieces together as it plans to roll out an offering covering process modeling, analysis, execution, business activity monitoring (BAM), collaboration, and business rules management. It expects to have an announcement by mid 2008.

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