Oracle Adds Business Activity Monitoring

BAM drills down into systems to troubleshoot problems in business workflows and builds on the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard, said Thomas Kurian, senior vice president at Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif.

Given that industry adoption of BPEL is growing, native support is critical, Kurian said. "Traditional EAI vendors like Tibco and WebMethods bolt BPEL on, but they [still] use their traditional languages and import/export BPEL. That's a lot of overhead," he said.

Some BAM support is already available in Oracle's e-business suite, he added.

Oracle Application Server 10.1.2's BAM capabilities will enable users to "drill down into business events in their supply chain, order fulfillment, etc., and figure out what a slip [in a] supplier's shipment means to the overall supply chain," Kurian said.

The system places agents in the relevant system components for feedback. RFID support is slated for this summer, he said.

The BAM solution brings realtime and predictive capabilities to the fore, whereas traditional business-intelligence vendors typically provide historical analysis, he said.

Business-intelligence and analytics leaders such as Business Objects and Cognos, however, all claim to offer similar realtime and predictive capabilities. The BAM data feeds into a central management console, where it can be correlated, filtered and subjected to analytics, Oracle said. The results can be viewed on a portal dashboard.

Oracle has been pushing its process management and integration capabilities into new markets, said Hoa Ton-That, senior manager of the Oracle technology practice at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young. "[The capabilities are] already strong in Oracle accounts and in some verticals," he said.

But it's hard for vendors like Oracle to win new customers outside their admittedly large installed bases, observers said. Pure-play integration companies say they have an advantage because they can tie into diverse applications from many vendors. "For Oracle, BAM is a natural market. It combines a lot of things they have competencies in"getting stuff out of databases, displaying it, performing business intelligence," said Shawn Willett, an analyst at Current Analysis.

But Oracle isn't alone in its business-process focus. Most major software vendors have pledged BPEL support. And there is also a host of pure-play business-intelligence and business-process management vendors, as well as a fledgling group of ISVs, offering Web services management and XML-based business visibility software.

"There is a lot of interest in business-process management capability, and Oracle, like SAP, is putting a lot of effort in," said Ken Vollmer, an analyst at Forrester Research. "They will probably hold their own with other vendors offering [business-process management], especially if the customer doesn't need all the bells and whistles that the pure-play guys offer."