IBM Acquisition Goes After Devil in Business Event Details
By Chris Gonsalves | Posted 2008-01-23

Business events—transactions, sales, utilization spikes—happen in an instant and often disappear just as quickly. Making sense of those events, as well as turning them into timely, actionable business intelligence is the challenge of business process management (BPM).
AptSoft software roots out cause-and-effect relationships in the 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 business
level,” says Sandy Carter vice president for SOA and WebSphere marketing, strategy
and channels at
For an e-commerce vendor, that might mean scouring customer activity 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 software applications to provide users with suggestions for healthier living. Fleet managers could make split-second decisions to deal with lost products and delayed shipments. And even in the in the massive multiplayer online game industry, the even recognition could root out unscrupulous activity buried in tens of thousands of game movements per second.
“We provide the ability for line-of-business users to define
business events that are actionable, define the correlation of patterns and
then to define actions they want to take place as a result,” says Frank
Chisholm, former
“The excitement we share with
For now that interface gives business analysts a way to detect, correlate, discover patterns and take action based on their own definitions. But Chisholm didn’t rule out the future development of industry-specific templates that would let users find trends and anomalies without having to touch every metric.
AptSoft products will become part of the
The integration with the
AptSoft has 19 customers mostly in the