11.03.03
The BAM Boom
Similar technology, different markets. At first glance, enterprise application integration (EAI) and data warehousing/business intelligence (BI) look like variations on a theme. Both require the integration and transformation of data from multiple sources to provide the big picture of what’s going on, or what went on, in an enterprise.
Yet, that’s where the similarity ends, and not surprisingly, that’s why both technologies have spawned different markets that appeal to different buyers within IT or the lines of business.
Technically, EAI systems play traffic cop between two or more transaction systems, mapping and forwarding data to and from, say, SAP to Siebel or Ariba. The goal, keeping transaction systems in sync, requires that the integrations be performed almost in real time. The users of these systems are the highly specialized, “heads-down” workers in the back office, whose entire job consists of using these systems to run day-to-day operations.
Conversely, BI applications are used by business analysts to figure out how to run things better. These applications typically glean trends from historical data to put the past or present in perspective. Consequently, they synthesize gobs of data from multiple sources, and converting and loading them into data warehouses (that are used by BI applications) in batch during off hours. In most cases, the people using these systems are not the ones performing daily operations.
Hence, the folks buying EAI are different from those buying BI.
So why has webMethods partnered with Informatica, and why did Ascential buy Mercator? Are these companies buying solutions looking for problems, or just trying to fill out their integration product portfolio checklists?
The answer is best summarized by three letters: BAM.
BAM, or Business Activity Monitoring, provides scorecards or dashboards that show metrics illustrate how well a company is performing. Because isolated data from an SAP or Siebel system usually doesn’t provide the full story, BAM systems typically synthesize data from multiple sources. (Sound familiar?) They are used for answering questions like, “how well are we serving our best customers?” or “how well are we meeting revenue or cost targets?” The most sophisticated BAM tools also alert users when thresholds are violated, while providing drill down capabilities for performing root cause analyses when all hell breaks loose.
Most important, BAM systems are equally useful working with current or historical data, which violates those clean demarcations separating EAI and BI markets. And, hype aside, BAM systems are probably one of the few cost-effective uses of real-time business intelligence today.
But selling BAM can be challenging because of the artificial frontiers between the enterprise integration and BI folks. Trying to get common buy-in will be a missionary sell, which is why — aside from the understandable excuse that it is currently digesting three other companies — webMethods has not yet acquired Informatica.