Wham, BAM!

Queenie Ng / Singapore

As more businesses strive for the ideal of a real-time enterprise, there is growing interest in reducing the latency of BI (Business Intelligence) delivery. Making faster decisions based on more real-time information can benefit enterprises seeking faster and more-efficient operational processes.

Business activity monitoring (BAM) is a new style of BI application that harnesses real-time events in the context of business operations.

According to research firm Gartner, the broad use of BAM software is still a year or more away, but by this year, it is expected to be among the top four initiatives at 30 percent of the world’s 2,000 biggest companies.

BI roots

While BAM is rooted in BI technology, it represents a departure from traditional batch-driven data warehousing approaches, and requires a fundamental re-evaluation of the architecture needed to support it.

Simon Piff, regional solutions marketing manager of Microsoft Asia Pacific & Greater China region, defined BAM as “operational BI”, as it monitors the functions and activities of an organisation’s operations.

The main difference between BI and BAM is that the former excels in analysing what has happened historically in a business, but is inherently incapable of providing real-time visibility and insight into current events.

In contrast, BAM focuses on what is happening in the enterprise, not what has or may happen.

“For example, BAM could monitor the number of leads in a sales pipeline, or efficiency of processes in a manufacturing cycle. In many cases, you can see that BAM data would provide the root-cause analysis information to BI, which looks more at aggregates,” said Piff.

So what comprises a BAM application? Quek Seow Hiah, lead consultant of National Computer Systems (NCS), said there are three key building blocks for building BAM, all of which are event-oriented.

• Event absorption

This layer is responsible for collecting events, filtering out irrelevant ones, and transforming events into a format that is usable by the event-processing layer.

The transformation validates messages and maps event attributes to a predefined data schema.

• Event processing and filtering

This layer is the heart of a BAM solution. The flood of validated events, arriving in real time, must be analysed for significance. There is no time to fall behind, so adequate performance is critical. Rules and context drive the event-processing layer by filtering out all but the important.

• Event action, delivery, and display

BAM solutions must have a way to quickly communicate their findings. The value of a BAM solution is determined by the contextual quality of an alert, its detail and the flexibility of delivery.

Crowded house

BAM products can incorporate concepts from—and are sometimes built on—ERP, BI, business process management, and enterprise application integration(EAI) software.

Most vendors of those types of products claim to have BAM offerings.

Not surprisingly, as the market grows rapidly, more and more vendors-not just BI vendors-would embrace BAM as the Next Big Thing.

Oracle, for example, said recently that it is adding business-activity monitoring capabilities to its application server.

The technology will provide managers with a dashboard for keeping tabs on key performance indicators. It links with Oracle E-Business Suite applications for acting on alerts.

Some EAI specialists have also used a BAM architecture to link heterogeneous applications and data sources together in real time.

“EAI vendors are in the best position to be able to collect all of the necessary data in a heterogeneous environment in real-time,” said Nicholas Tang, general manager of WebMethods Hong Kong/Taiwan.

“If an enterprise uses a single application (homogenous environment) and the vendor has a BAM tool that provides the functionality discussed above, then it may be the best choice.”

However, BAM is a relatively tiny part of the total EAI market today.

Research house Forrester/ Giga estimates that less than 5 percent of integration broker revenue was BAM-related in 2002, although it expects this figure to rise significantly in 2003 and 2004.

Warning: Data ahead

Deploying BAM applications is not easy, and while many vendors are trying to incorporate BAM into their applications, this could lead to data explosion if it is not incorporated into the overall BI strategy, said Microsoft’s Piff.

“Since BAM can be considered a subset of BI, it is important that a single view of the data remains intact, and organisations do not go off creating new silos of data that incur further integration cost at a later date,” he noted.

For BAM to be successful, Piff suggested that companies ensure that a BAM solution be a part of the overall BI plan. If it does not get integrated, and causes a new data silo, then it is probably the wrong solution.

This article first appeared in Asia Computer Weekly.