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October 9, 2002

Infrastructure Going BAM

EAI is going bonkers with industry hype

by Mark Smith

Starting new IT projects is more difficult than ever, and correlating technology investments to business value has become critical. This requires more than just articulating what can be developed but actually demonstrating end-user capabilities. Recently, significant hype has developed around a new term called business activity monitoring (BAM) that Gartner defined in 2001. BAM is the ability to provide real-time access to critical business performance indicators to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations. These improvements are made available through a set of technologies that can provide real-time dashboards, monitoring and alerting, and reporting capabilities.

Not surprisingly the hype about BAM is confusing organizations trying to determine its applicability and how it fits into their enterprise architecture and business requirements. Further confusing the issue are technology suppliers' marketing efforts — recently evident among enterprise application integration (EAI) providers (SeeBeyond, Tibco Software Inc., and WebMethods Inc.). In the last several months, Tibco acquired BAM provider Praja, WebMethods announced partnership agreements with Informatica Corp., and SeeBeyond held a BAM Webinar. These evolutionary steps and convergences are possibly healthy for the market, but with scanty information on their Web sites about how BAM fits into these EAI vendors' futures, they are fueling a risky bet and diverting attention from their core competencies.

These EAI vendors are trying their best to demonstrate business value as corporations cut EAI spending. The EAI vendors are under tremendous pressure from application platform providers (IBM, Oracle, and Sybase) and application providers (SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel Systems Inc.) encroach of their territory through acquisitions and evolutionary technology advancements for inter-application integration. These new competitors are driving EAI vendors to diverge from their integration roots and jump on the bandwagon of providing more end user tool and application components.

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Be wary of the BAM market until some real facts and direction develop that can provide the context of how it synchronizes with your organization and your existing business intelligence and enterprise applications investments. Although EAI vendors think that real-time business is the next big thing, many organizations are not prepared for the havoc that may come from deploying monitoring and alerting throughout the enterprise. Don't get dragged into the acronym hype cycle and make any assumptions on BAM, it can deliver value, but it's unclear yet if the EAI vendors will be the right choice for addressing these business requirements.

First Industry Research on BAM

Would you like to provide input and your views on BAM and how you look to measure and monitor business activities and processes? Participate in this research survey and get a report on what organizations are doing to address this evolving market.

Mark Smith [mark.smith@fullcirclestrategies.com] is a principal and founder of Full Circle Strategies, a business strategy services firm focused on providing insight into the performance management market.