Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant

Gartner Inc. has positioned Microsoft Corp., a leading provider of business process management (BPM) software, in the “Leaders” quadrant in its 2007 Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis (BPA) Tools, 2H07-1H08 report.1 The report evaluates services and products that include Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPA Tools examines how business process analysis tools continue to grow in importance as business managers, process architects and process analysts seek to better capture, understand, streamline and automate their business processes. Gartner also underscored that BPA is increasingly used for compliance and process improvement initiatives. For business process (BP) improvement, BPA is the key link between business activity monitoring and workflow assembly and business orchestration.

“As businesses look more and more to process improvements as a core driver of growth and profitability, they made it clear that they want an easier way to analyze their processes, many of which are already captured in Office Visio 2007 diagrams,” said Richard Wolf, general manager of the Office Graphics Division at Microsoft. “This led us to focus Office Visio 2007 on integrating and displaying process, system and activity data directly in Office Visio 2007 diagrams for easier exploration and understanding.”

Office Visio 2007 makes it easy for IT and business professionals to visualize, explore and communicate complex information. Through the ability of Office Visio 2007 to graphically show data from multiple sources within diagrams, users can finally see process information within its context, resulting in an easier way to streamline business processes, track projects and resources, chart organizations, map networks, diagram building sites and optimize systems. Instead of static pictures, users can create data-connected Office Visio 2007diagrams that display data, are easy to refresh and can dramatically increase productivity.