Tibco Integrates Praja Technology

BusinessFactor, described by Tibco executives as a business-activity monitoring tool that detects and examines patterns related to business processes and activities across an enterprise, provides a broad view of companywide data and can be tailored by solution providers to a company's business goals.

This is not a business intelligence tool that collects and churns out historical business data, said Scott Fingerhut, senior product marketing manager at Tibco, based here. "This is about what's happening now. We're talking about the aggregation of processes, and it's what set Praja apart."

Tibco acquired Praja last year, for an undisclosed sum, to enhance its business integration products.

BusinessFactor not only monitors activities and data from different parts of a company but also alerts solution providers and end users when a process is so flawed that it's creating inefficiencies in the ways employees work. "If there's a consistent problem, it [gets diverted] into a change management category," Fingerhut said.

Tibco is counting on solution provider partners to bring to bear their expertise in different industries, said Larry Neaumann, director of market strategies at the company.

Orincon Defense, for example, is a Tibco partner that builds decision-support applications for branches of the U.S. military. The systems integrator worked with Praja's technology before it was acquired by Tibco, said David Frost, maritime marketing manager at Orincon, San Diego.

"We've been doing pattern recognition and needle-in-the-haystack stuff for 30 years," Frost said. "We were a VAR with Praja, but we've become a technology alliance partner with Tibco. We help co-market a Tibco-Praja system to the military."

Orincon customers such as the U.S. Navy's Space & Naval Warfare Systems Command need software that can make sense of data by time, location and many other factors, Frost said.

Pricing for BusinessFactor 4.0, shipping now, starts at about $350,000.