In a move to round out its recent spate of purchases in the BPM space, Metastorm announced on Tuesday that it will acquire Spotlight Data, a company that specializes in process data collection. Process data typically include such information as how long it takes to complete a process and the common order of steps to finish the task.

Last month Metastorm acquired Process Competence, and in August, the company acquired Proforma.

According to Colin Teubner, BPM analyst with Forrester Research, the acquisition of Spotlight Data will give Metastorm and important source of data to feed into the Proforma process analysis engine, which, in turn, optimizes business processes.

The Spotlight Data technology will be called marketed as Metastorm Discovery and will also capture offline activities within a process.

While point solution and vertical solution providers have been the subject of many recent acquisitions by the giants of the software industry such as Oracle, SAP, and IBM, BPM has to date remained untouched by these acquirers who have chosen instead to build out their own solutions, said Teubner.

Metastorm Discovery is available immediately and has already been integrated into the Metastorm provision BPM suite.