BAM Gathers Momentum

Vendors from diverse backgrounds converge on the market

Several vendors recently announced they've expanded their product portfolios to include business activity monitoring (BAM). The timing of the announcements is probably merely coincidental, but there is evidence of emerging demand from enterprises.

Gartner coined the term BAM in 2001 to refer to IT systems that alert people to threshold conditions found during analysis of real-time business events — which need to be understood in terms of business processes rather than the IT applications that happen to support them. These systems, when built with individual components, usually include a message broker (or other application integration infrastructure), a DBMS, a rules engine, a notification service, and a BI reporting tool.

In a short period of time late this year, several enterprise software vendors came out with a BAM story. Perhaps underscoring sellers' attraction to the space, one of those vendors has ventured far from its reputed core competency to get into the BAM game.

That vendor is InterSystems. For 25 years, InterSystems concentrated exclusively on its DBMS, Cache. Only now is the company expanding into enterprise integration and, continuing up the value chain, BAM. Trevor Matz, managing director of EAI at InterSystems, says the company began hatching its Ensemble integration platform two years ago because the application integration market was growing while, simultaneously, emerging XML standards had begun facilitating a nimbler way to integrate applications.

InterSystems used its object database expertise to create a persistent object engine in Ensemble that stores metadata, messages, and process-state information. It integrates with third-party business process management tools through the XML-based Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard. Ensemble includes a customizable monitoring facility that you can use to monitor business events in the context of business processes and persisted (historical) data.

Webmethods is more typical of the hybrid entrants to the BAM market. Like several vendors that have bought or built BAM products in the past, Webmethods is principally considered an enterprise application integration (EAI) vendor. The EAI market has been losing opportunities to enterprise information integration (EII) and other, similar, lightweight methods of delivering quick, consolidated views of heterogeneous data.

Webmethods entered the BAM space through acquisition, picking up Dante Systems in October. It trails competitor Tibco by a stretch: Tibco acquired pure-play BAM vendor Praja almost exactly a year before.

But Bill Gassman, a principal analyst at Gartner, thinks Webmethods is still on time. "I think the sophistication of the market is not there yet. What Tibco and Vitria and Webmethods are doing with a rather lightweight approach [small, focused applications rather than enterprisewide BAM] is actually perfect for where the market is today. This is something that's still a couple years away from being a big thing."

That said, Gassman reports that enterprises are increasingly showing interest in BAM, even if that interest is nascent and doesn't match the level of vendor involvement. "Six months ago, I'd get 10 vendor calls for every single enterprise call. Today it's probably seven or eight vendor calls for every enterprise call," he says.

The apparent level of interest may be skewed by the gap that lies between recognition of a need and awareness that the need has a label. Ventana Research conducted a survey late this year that showed most organizations (58 percent) were unfamiliar with BAM. However, 93 percent of 894 respondents agreed that "measuring and monitoring the efficiency of business activities and processes" is very or somewhat important.

— Jeanette Burriesci

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