Oracle's BAM Removes Dashboard Complexity

Oracle

BAM is primarily used for building business analytics dashboards that collect and display data from ERPs, CRMs and custom applications. Since most enterprise packaged applications already provide Web services connectivity, BAM does not require a lot of custom integration work.

Oracle's BAM paradigm works well with adapters from packaged applications because these adapters can manage most of the transactional load before providing data to BAM.

For instance, BAM only needs to pick the data whenever changes occur and does not need to poll systems for changes. Instead, BAM listens for changes to Java Message Service (JMS) messages, so information can be transferred from one system to BAM in realtime and without interference. Data also can come from integration solutions that use third-party products such as Tibco BusinessWorks and IBM WebSphere.

BAM's key advantage over business intelligence (BI)which is typically used to analyze historical datais that it can display data from disparate systems in realtime. Because complex enterprise systems often mix human workflows with business processes, external partner systems and packaged applications, rapid responses from business users are often required and this is where BAM towers over BI.

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Financial services managers, for example, must take risk allocations into account to minimize giving out loans to risky customers. These managers have to balance all of this information using dashboards that present data in realtime.

These loan dashboards display entire loan provisioning processes and provide different warning thresholds to alert managers when lenders react erroneously after the acceptance process runs through. To simplify these complex processes, developers can get Oracle BAM dashboards to cascade between different data sets to help managers become more efficient at detecting potential business mistakes.

These key performance indicators can be spread across multiple dashboards to simplify viewable areas on each dashboard and relate data in more meaningful ways. Oracle BAM normalizes data from several denormalized and normalized data feeds into integrated, multidimensional tables.

Since Oracle BAM can be layered on top of almost any customized application, solution providers can easily provide more customizable system monitoring without the expense of developing interfaces. Even when some customization is required, the steps involved are manageable. For instance, events from business process management engines can be changed to produce messages on a JMS queue that is consumed by BAM.

Under its cover, Oracle BAM arrives with an analytics engine that has a built-in rules engine to control data flow into the dashboards. The rules that are created in BAM are not used to manipulate data for viewing, so developers do not have to massage data views. Since BAM is event driven, rules are made to indicate thresholds through visual effects. In addition, BAM arrives with some 30 customizable reports and configurable dashboards.

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