BAM, CPE, BEM, or Operational BI, what are the differences?

Business Intelligence (BI) in many companies has been used for several years to monitor, report and analyze, and improve business performance. Until now, most BI applications have focused on managing strategic and tactical business plans, but now Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Complex Event Processing (CPE), Business Event Management (BEM) and/or operational BI could add a new dimension to this otherwise mature software area.

Business success demands continuous visibility into operations and processes. Operational BI or “awareness” should reduce the time between the occurrence of a business event and initiation of a response, helping a company act on competitive opportunities. Practically all operational areas need increased operational BI - awareness. Order cancellation, a late order delivery, an imbalance between resource capacity and demand, and a stock-out are just a few examples of events that require immediate action.

Increasingly, lines of businesses realize that to become more responsive, they must accelerate the flow of information, analysis and the decision-making. Major benefits of operational BI - awareness, which extend beyond strategic and tactical decision-making to daily management, include:

• A real-time visibility into business processes (this would require automated processes through the use of Business Process Management suites (BPMs)
• An increased business agility and flexibility
• A maximized use of resources (human mostly)
• Minimized risk
• A collaboration with a broader set of participants
  

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is an event stream capture and has been around for many years. This is a technology and a technique that provide real-time access to key business metrics. The reasons for deploying BAM are to monitor key business objectives, anticipate operational risks, and reduce the time between a material event and taking effective action.

There are many BAM products from platform (e.g. IBM Websphere Business Monitor, Oracle BAM, BEA ProActivity Process Analysis (PA), Aptsoft product.

Business Event Monitoring (BEM) is a way to get machines in real-time to alert people when a business process is going wrong and needs human attention to get back on track. BEM focuses also on the business rules and then alerts humans when something goes wrong. The goal is to speed processes up by minimizing time lost because of an exception. As previously written, BAM monitors business processes in real time in an effort to support operational improvements. Where BAM typically concerns itself with managing a single business process, BEM is generally concerned with monitoring all current processes to provide meaningful alerts and analytics to users. We should think of BEM as real-time data mining. While BEM is not yet part of many vendor offerings, this technology is making an appearance in some products. Vitria Technology's Resolution Accelerator provides BEM capability. Lombardi Software's Undercover Agents provide also BEM functionality.

Operational BI is also about the use of operational intelligence to manage and optimize business processes. When this is deployed, the huge analytical power of BI is unleashed on everyday processes that can generate improvements in real-time. This can exist alongside traditional BI, helping organizations to improve business operations both at strategic and business process levels.

Operational BI is the way BI vendors try to sell “type of BAM” applications, but…

Currently, most of Operational BI products refer only to data sensors.

Are they linked to BPM? It seems not because they still continue to use ETL and data access replication principles. Additionally BI vendors are not the best vendors to follow some of the trends about BEM which is often seen as an extension to BAM.

Some vendors like Systar pretend to be “BAM” but are in the same basket than the BI vendors in that case. And only BPM vendors with BAM features are able top provide such link. In counterpart BAM products often do not store good historical data like for example a BI do. It is then difficult to make comparison between operation data with historical data.

As already described, the ultimate goal of BAM environments is to immediately react from dashboards and the goal of BEM is to link the detection of events (including compound events collected for example by CEP) and then provide different management features like : diagnosis help, root cause analysis, management by exception. All of those require BAM (or operational BI) to work closer with the event generator: BPM in particular or other sensors. If we link those at data level only we miss the point. That means that every time we change a process we would have for example to reconfigure the data access, KPI and so on. Operational BI products are not
bad solutions but good for some customers and not enough for others.

The term BAM may become out of vogue in the future and vendors will turn to marketing their products under the banner of Operational BI. BI and BPM are two separate technology areas, complement each other and will converge over the next three to five years. Currently they are being used today in their respective worlds with very little overlap.

Will Service Management solutions become SOA Governance platforms?

As a starting point, let’s re-define what a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is… A CMDB is a database that holds a complete record of all configuration items (CIs) associated with the IT Infrastructure, software, hardware, including information about servers, storage devices, networks, middleware, applications and data, i.e. versions, location, documentation, components and the relationships between them.

Configuration Management which is one of the main ITIL processes requires the use of support tools, which include a CMDB. Physical and electronic libraries should be set up parallel to the CMDB to hold definitive copies of software and documentation.

Until now, several vendors have provided through their Service Desk offering, and out of the box CMDB which in some case could be altered. Among these vendors we can find, BMC-Remedy, HP, Peregrine (now HP…), Axios systems, Computer Associates, Mercury (now HP…), IBM, and many others.

Last April, some vendors like CA, BMC, IBM, and Fujitsu announced they would work toward developing "an industry standard for federating and accessing IT information" that would ideally integrate communication between disparate configuration management databases.

CMDBs have become one of central elements of enterprise IT management, so a standards-based approach to this critical functionality is necessary and valuable.

Looking at SOA and the way we define composite applications and services, we definitely need to build the latest on the top of existing IT Infrastructure, software and hardware. In other words, a CMDB could also be used to manage the catalogue of SOA Services!

I would be tempted to think that in the next 2 years, a CMDB will be a modular component, usable by either Service Management solutions, and/or SOA Governance products. A CMDB could become a sort of “plugin” available from various vendors with sets of APIs, and why not web services.

SOAs are distributed computing plans where companies often situate Web services and reuse code and other assets to create efficiencies. Vendors like IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Oracle, and Mercury are creating SOA infrastructure platforms to speed information exchange between different computing machines. A few months ago, prior to HP acquisition, Mercury acquired a SOA company named Systinet. This acquisition strengthened Mercury's position in the high growth SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) market by giving the company leading SOA governance and lifecycle management products.

An integration point should be between the SOA metadata repositories and a configuration management database (CMDB) to manage the lifecycle through to operations. If HP considers the range of acquisition they recently did with Peregrine, Mercury...and Systinet…there would be a high probability, this integration occurs!

Another observation on this future integration is potentially visible with IBM. IBM released recently a CMDB titled Tivoli CCMDB, and also launched a management and security solutions for managing SOA based applications, IBM launched last April IT Service Management platform.

The IBM IT Service Management platform manages SOA based composite applications. It is supposed to offer an approach to defining a framework and solutions for IT service management, including extending self-managing autonomic computing to IT services.

“Tivoli CCMDB uses a Federated model that allows it to be implemented on top of an existing sources of IT data, and serves as an authoritative source of data for configuration items, their relationships, so that when a change needs to be made to any of the IT components, one can understand the impact of that change on other related components. IBM's ITSM platform along with, IBM Tivoli security and compliance products like Tivoli Access Manager and Tivoli Federated Identity Manager delivers a complete end-to-end solution for the "manage", "secure" and "compliance" of distributed SOA applications.”

IBM and HP are two companies which will probably compete in both IT Service Management and SOA. They probably understood the synergy between the two worlds, and we can predict a future new generation of CMDBs, modular, accessible from web services, and used for several companies needs: Service Management and SOA Governance.