IBM Acquisition Goes After Devil in Business Event Details

Business events?transactions, sales, utilizationspikes?happen in an instant and often disappear just as quickly. Making senseof those events, as well as turning them into timely, actionable businessintelligence is the challenge of business process management (BPM).

 

IBM moved to bolster itsBPM offerings through the acquisition of privately held AptSoft, aMassachusetts-based vendor of business-event-processing software. Big Blue paidan undisclosed amount for the 6-year-old privately-held software company in aneffort to bolster its service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio and deliveran easy-to-implement events tool in a market that is expected to top $1 billionby 2010, according toIBM representatives.

 

AptSoft software roots out cause-and-effect relationships inthe myriad business events occurring in milliseconds across most enterprises.The tool, designed for use by business analysts rather than IT administrators,identifies patterns and can initiate action when a trend emerges. 

 

?[AptSoft] really elevates event processing at the businesslevel,? says Sandy Carter vice president for SOA and WebSphere marketing, strategyand channels atIBM in Armonk, N.Y. Carteradds that the AptSoft tools take ?something that today only engineersunderstand,? and deliver it to business users in an intuitive, less technicalway.

 

For an e-commerce vendor, that might mean scouring customeractivity to ferret out fraud or reduce the incidence of dropped shopping carts.In health care, the tools could be used to scour a variety of medical softwareapplications to provide users with suggestions for healthier living. Fleetmanagers could make split-second decisions to deal with lost products anddelayed shipments. And even in the in the massive multiplayer online gameindustry, the even recognition could root out unscrupulous activity buried intens of thousands of game movements per second.

 

?We provide the ability for line-of-business users to definebusiness events that are actionable, define the correlation of patterns andthen to define actions they want to take place as a result,? says FrankChisholm, formerCEO and founder ofAptSoft.  ?As SOA continues to evolve,companies are linking event processing and BPM to gain deeper insight into thetransactions and events that shape their business and industries as a whole.

 

?The excitement we share withIBMis in the instrumentation.IBM is very keenon the interface,? Chisholm adds.

 

For now that interface gives business analysts a way todetect, correlate, discover patterns and take action based on their owndefinitions. But Chisholm didn?t rule out the future development ofindustry-specific templates that would let users find trends and anomalieswithout having to touch every metric.

 

AptSoft products will become part of theIBMSoftware Group WebSphere software brand. The acquired technology will be addedto existingIBM business event processingand BPM tools including: WebSphere Event Broker, WebSphere Business Monitor,WebSphere Application Server, DB2 Real-Time Insight and Tivoli NetCoolproducts.

 

The integration with theIBMproducts should be complete by early summer, according toIBMofficials.

 

AptSoft has 19 customers mostly in theU.S.,though officials declined to comment on whether the software vendors isprofitable.