News

At Gartner Summit: Tibco unveils new BAM tool

• By Rich Seeley
• May 19, 2004

Tibco Software Inc. unveiled a new Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) offering for both IT managers and business analysts at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Service Summit this week.

Combining open source and open standards, Tibco OpsFactor was written in Java with 'XML at the core,' said Scott Fingerhut, general manager of business optimization products at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based integration software vendor.

Demonstrating the new product, which runs on Tibco's BusinessWorks integration platform, Fingerhut showed how it can be used to provide a dashboard view of either IT or business performance. IT managers can see in real-time where processing problems are arising.

However, Fingerhut pointed out that data processing is only half the BAM picture. In a loan application system, for example, all of the data could be running through at warp speed, but if a majority of the loans were not being approved that is a potential business problem.

In a product demonstration on his laptop, Fingerhut showed how both IT managers and business managers can quickly create drag-and-drop custom views of their systems and processes to see the information that is critical to both.

OpsFactor has adapters for extracting data from databases such as Oracle, and ERP systems such as SAP, Fingerhut told XDT. All data is transformed into standard XML to create the bar charts and other displays in the end user's dashboard that can be accessed via a standard Web browser, he added.

The new BAM tool, which begins shipping this week, is the culmination of a more than five-year development process at Tibco, he said. More information on Tibco is available at http://www.tibco.com.

For more Gartner conference coverage, please go to http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=9188