With this deal, Whitehill now owns the patented technology platform behind Metaserver's suite of business process integration (BPI) software and solutions for the insurance industry. Whitehill will use the acquired technology to further the company's penetration into its key markets, including insurance, legal and financial services.

The Java-based platform is a proven technology in the insurance sector, where Metaserver has been deploying solutions that have enabled leading insurance carriers and their field agents to exchange quotes, claims and other critical business information in real time and at half the cost of traditional approaches, resulting in faster time to market and superior customer service.

"Metaserver's BPI technology is a perfect complement to our data transformation products for the insurance and financial services sectors," said Paul McSpurren, president and CEO, Whitehill Technologies. "Whitehill's integration of the Metaserver technology platform will provide significant additional business process acceleration benefits to both our existing and future customers. Our industry partners such as Thomson Elite, Computer Associates, and IBM will also have access to this enhanced functionality for their users."

Today's acquisition is Whitehill's first since the company landed $4.1 million in a Series B funding round in November. McSpurren said he expects the acquisition to lead to the creation of up to ten jobs at its corporate headquarters in Moncton, NB.

"To fully automate transactions, you must improve and accelerate the manner in which you enter structured and unstructured data into the core insurance systems. Automation to capture the data and then pass it to the appropriate system is needed," writes Gartner Analyst Kimberley Harris-Ferrante in the January 5, 2005, Events Lay the Groundwork for Electronic Transactions. In the report, she identifies BPI solutions that blend application integration capability, data transformation and business process management as being a key advancement in assisting the capture and exchange of data and information.

Business process integration is the integration of processes and the sharing of information among diverse business systems. BPI helps streamline operations, reduce costs and improve responsiveness to customer demands.