Metastorm CEO Bob Farrell gave a briefing this morning about their acquisition of Proforma; not much that wasn’t covered in the press release except the following:
- Their customers were demanding BPA functionality that obviously went beyond what they offered as part of their BPMS.
- They’ll be using Proforma’s CIF as an interchange format — a major mistake for process models in my opinion. Although CIF does provide support for a number of other enterprise architecture model types, they’re really going to be using this for getting process models into the Metastorm BPMS execution environment. In a post that I did at the end of the Proforma user conference last year, I noted that in spite of their lip service to standards, they only support BPEL export via a CIF remapping, XPDL wasn’t on their roadmap yet, and I’m not sure that they had started to think about BPDM. Of course, if they abandon the hope of selling ProVision to users of other BPMS’, then this may not matter much since it will just be an internal interchange standard between their own tools.