Business-Activity Apps Get Closer To RealityBusiness-Activity Apps Get Closer To Reality

Broad use of business-activity monitoring software is still a year or more away, but by 2004 it's expected to be among the top four initiatives at 30% of the world's 2,000 biggest companies, according to research firm Gartner.

Business-activity monitoring applications are designed primarily to let operational managers make day-to-day decisions in areas such as revenue optimization, dynamic pricing, financial portfolio monitoring, real-time marketing, inventory management, and manufacturing-quality management. Startup Celequest Corp. last week became the latest to debut real-time business-intelligence tools that analyze live data from manufacturing, financial, and retail systems.

Celequest's ActivityServer suite monitors streaming data from operational systems on a continuous basis. Using business rules and metrics, the software can alert a manufacturing manager when production yields are down or a store manager when inventory is running low. That's in contrast to conventional business-intelligence tools that business analysts and executives generally use to analyze historical data for strategic planning. Celequest's software also can identify trends and patterns by comparing the streaming data with historical data in a data warehouse.

Brocade Communications Systems Inc., which manufactures storage area network switches, is using the ActivityServer suite to build a prototype system to monitor production yields at its contract manufacturers. The plan is to compare production-yield data with benchmark historical data, says Jim Cates, CIO and information technology VP. Brocade has tried to do that using only a data warehouse, he says, "but I never get as close to real time as I want." Data warehouses today receive more data in near real time, but they're still more suitable for analyzing snapshots of historical data, says Diaz Nesamoney, Celequest's founder, president, and CEO.

Celequest joins a number of vendors in the arena, including Vigilance Inc. and Tibco Software Inc. Tibco acquired Praja Inc., an early business-activity monitoring player, last September and built Praja's technology into the latest release of its BusinessFactor application. In April, Informatica Corp. and webMethods Inc. debuted their jointly developed Business Activity Platform, combining webMethods' enterprise application integration software with Informatica's business-intelligence and real-time data integration tools. Microsoft is adding business-activity monitoring capabilities to its Content, Commerce, and BizTalk servers; Sybase Inc. has done so with its integration-broker product.

Reuters Group plc uses Tibco's BusinessFactor as part of the risk-management services it provides to financial-services companies, monitoring financial transactions to spot trends and identify credit risks. Reuters also has developed a prototype application using BusinessFactor to monitor financial systems for compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, director Julian Fisher says.

Celequest's suite includes the core streaming data-store software for processing real-time data, a modeling engine for analysis and business-rule execution, an application workbench for building tools for data transformation and viewing data streams, a scenario modeler for specifying business rules and alerting conditions, and an activity dashboard that gives users information and alerts. Pricing starts at $100,000.

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