White PapersThis is the first MarketScope published on the BAM platform market. Since 2001, we have treated BAM more as a technology and set of best practices than as a market. After all, the technology is often deployed by enterprises by using existing investments, such as business intelligence (BI) or IT operations tools, or embedded in business applications rather than sold as a product or as an option. Because many sources of BAM technology exist, it is difficult to measure the market revenue that encompasses all styles of BAM deployments. We have chosen to focus on a subset of the market — the BAM platform market — because, since it can be defined, we can measure specific customer demand as well as vendors' supply of products.
BAM platforms are adaptable. They are not locked into supporting any specific application or event source, but can be used to monitor almost any form of business activity. A limited number of products meet this criterion. Many products that advertise BAM functions are only able to monitor the application and data set with which they are integrated. These products are not addressed in this research.
ResearchPublication Date: 16 August 2006 ID Number: G00142011 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Although Gartner's research may discuss legal issues related to the information technology business, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. MarketScope for Business Activity Monitoring Platforms, 3Q06 Bill Gassman A promising business activity monitoring market exists for organizations looking to deploy these platforms, and many good products are available. Nine BAM platforms, including several pure-play solutions, are described and rated. Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 2 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW A rich and promising selection of business activity monitoring (BAM) platforms are available to evaluate. Most are available from vendors of business process management technologies, application integration middleware or business applications, but a few pure-play choices also exist. Leading products are able to connect to multiple event sources, address complex monitoring requirements and perform well enough to handle heavy streams of events. STRATEGIC PLANNING ASSUMPTION(S) Through 2010, the adoption of BAM platforms will grow at least 200 percent from 2006 levels (0.7 probability). The BAM platform market will survive through 2010, although market representation of direct sales by pure-play vendors will remain less than 2 percent of the overall market (0.7 probability). By the end of 2008, each of the major business intelligence vendors will build or buy BAM functionality (0.7 probability). MARKETSCOPE This is the first MarketScope published on the BAM platform market. Since 2001, we have treated BAM more as a technology and set of best practices than as a market. After all, the technology is often deployed by enterprises by using existing investments, such as business intelligence (BI) or IT operations tools, or embedded in business applications rather than sold as a product or as an option. Because many sources of BAM technology exist, it is difficult to measure the market revenue that encompasses all styles of BAM deployments. We have chosen to focus on a subset of the market the BAM platform market because, since it can be defined, we can measure specific customer demand as well as vendors' supply of products. BAM platforms are adaptable. They are not locked into supporting any specific application or event source, but can be used to monitor almost any form of business activity. A limited number of products meet this criterion. Many products that advertise BAM functions are only able to monitor the application and data set with which they are integrated. These products are not addressed in this research. The nine vendors included in this MarketScope represent pure-play BAM and application integration middleware vendors. Celequest, Syndera and Systar are pure-play vendors and, in each of these cases, the company is wholly focused on BAM. Axway, Progress Software, Tibco Software and webMethods focus on the application integration middleware markets, including business process management (BPM)-enabling technology, but also offer stand-alone BAM products. Two megavendors, Microsoft and Oracle, develop BAM tools in their middleware organizations, but these products are also aligned with their BI and business application strategies. Many vendors were not included in this MarketScope because they did not meet all the criteria (see inclusion/exclusion criteria section). For example: " IBM has a BAM-like solution that is part of the WebSphere product line, but this is designed to work only within a WebSphere-modeled process. Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 3 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. " The eBAM product from Sun Microsystems gained when Sun acquired SeeBeyond is tightly integrated with its process management tools and does not qualify as a stand-alone BAM platform. " Information Builders positions its BI abilities with its iWay adapters and process orchestration as a toolkit to address BAM requirements, but it is not packaged as a platform. " BAM capability is claimed by some of the BI vendors, such as Cognos and MicroStrategy, as their products can use rapid sequences of complex SQL queries to monitor metrics across diverse data sources. Although some BAM requirements are met with this technique, performance is an issue. Most BI tools are not architected to address event-driven processing or to frequently update a dashboard. The results of a search engine query for "business activity monitoring" include many vendors that claim to offer BAM features. Most vendors are not mentioned in this report because they have not come to our attention through client inquiries or briefings. This does not mean that they are necessarily inappropriate for your organization. Consider your requirements and then evaluate other BAM vendors as we did, especially with respect to scope, scale, complexity and experience. Our evaluation included a wide range of criteria related to vision and execution. In addition, we evaluated each BAM product against a list of basic and advanced features we published in 2005 ("Selection Requirements for Selecting a Business Activity Monitoring Tool"). The vendors listed in this report represent about 100 new BAM platform installations per year. By 2010, the adoption of BAM platforms will grow at least 200 percent from 2006 levels (0.7 probability). In addition to the BAM platform market, BAM deployment overall is getting a boost from other sources. For example, BAM is becoming a competitive requirement in the BPM suites and BPM pure-play markets, and is an OEM opportunity for BAM pure-play vendors. With the modeled process that BPM tools provide, it is easier to identify key business metrics and to capture relevant events that occur within the process. Another wave of increased BAM adoption will come from application vendors that integrate BAM into their offerings. Starting in 2007, Oracle and SAP will be significant drivers of BAM embedded in applications. Specialty vendors that solve problems, such as complex event processing for the investment services market, will also grow the deployment of BAM, but these will be very targeted tools, not a general-purpose platform. By the end of 2008, each of the major BI vendors will build or buy BAM functionality (0.7 probability). Most organizations will eventually have multiple BAM products, and will learn to treat an alert from one BAM system as an event going into another. Although semantic and format transformation tools will address interoperability issues for a while, future generations of BAM will require event and notification standards. Market/Market Segment Description BAM is defined by Gartner as providing real-time access to key business performance indicators. A BAM platform is a separate and complete software product, designed and marketed to develop and deploy a broad set of BAM applications. Examples of BAM applications include deadline management, skipped process alerts and detection of compliance violations. End-users, who are largely business operations staff, application support groups and business executives, see BAM function through alerts and dashboards, but BAM systems can also trigger automated external processes with an alert message. Some people use other terms to describe BAM, such as "real-time BI" or "operational intelligence," and some related terms are often confused with BAM, such as "operational BI" and "process-driven BI." Operational and process-driven BI are data-driven rather than event-driven Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 4 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. approaches, but may access operational sources other than a data warehouse. They are used to improve workflow decisions by introducing reports and analysis directly into the workflow of a business process. In mature implementations, multiple technologies converge. For example, BAM is responsible for rapidly generating awareness of critical issues, while operational BI is responsible for decision analysis and BPM tools are responsible for orchestrating the decided action. For the purposes of this report, Gartner defines a BAM platform as a self-contained product that delivers BAM functionality without other specific software prerequisites. A BAM platform may be aligned or potentially integrated with other tools, such as a business process modeling application or enterprise service bus, but does not require its use. Additional characteristics of a BAM platform include: " Access to a wide variety of events and changing data sources through the use of messaging, adapters and agents " A rule editor and continuous operation rule engine with threshold, sequence and time-based processing of user-defined metrics " A dashboard for the display of real-time metrics and alarms " Optionally, a historical operational data store for trend analysis. The BAM platform market will survive through 2010, although market representation of direct sales by pure-play vendors will remain less than 2 percent of the overall market (0.7 probability). As BAM becomes more-deeply integrated with business applications, BPM and BI vendors' offerings, most organizations will acquire BAM as part of a portfolio from one or more category of vendors not as a separate platform. The market demand for BAM platforms will continue, initially driven by the need for availability and broader access to events outside of a specific application. In the longer term, the BAM platform market will be driven by an OEM channel, innovation, vertical market expertise and flexibility. Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria The BAM platform products mentioned here address each layer of the BAM reference architecture (event absorption, event processing, and action-delivery-display) that Gartner has published. In addition: " The product is available as a stand-alone package, though it may also be offered as an add-on option with other products. " The product has generated the equivalent of at least 2 million in new license sales in the past 12 months. " At least six deployments are in production. " The vendor has significant market mind share, based on Gartner client inquiries. " The product has a part number, and details about the product are available on the company's Web site. " At least three references were made available representing the product's capability and high watermark of sophisticated use. We made an exception for the BAM product from Microsoft. It is built into BizTalk Server 2006, and can be inexpensive to purchase. We evaluated BizTalk Server as a BAM platform because a Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 5 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. considerable number of customers have deployed it purely as a BAM tool, using the BPM tools within BizTalk only as a workflow engine for BAM actions. Rating for Overall Market/Market Segment Overall Market Rating: Promising We rate the BAM platform market promising, because identifying nine vendors with BAM platforms was not difficult. Tight selection criteria were required to keep the number of vendors in the report manageable. Each vendor chosen offers a viable product with a growing customer base. Although some products are still evolving, investment commitments are solid and product road maps look good. We are confident of the growth of BAM deployments in organizations, but the products, number of deployments and sophistication in use cases are still too weak to warrant a positive rating for the BAM market. The average rating for vendor products is positive, but the market overall is still inhibited by a lack of awareness of the benefits of BAM and insufficient command of processes required to get the greatest value from it. There are still too many requirements on IT to operate the BAM system, and business users find it difficult to identify actionable metrics. Evaluation Criteria Table 1. Evaluation Criteria Evaluation Criteria Comment Weighting Market Understanding How does the vendor view the BAM market? What do they see as the competitive forces? Where will BAM be in three years? What are the biggest challenges for sales? What are the most important strategic decisions to be made about the vendor's BAM product in the next six months? standard Marketing Strategy Who is the buyer and what is their decision process? Is the initial contact in IT or a business user? What is the target mix of direct, indirect and OEM sales? What sales and marketing programs are in place to attract the target markets? What partner programs are in place for sales and systems integration? What are the goals for market share increase, and what resources will be deployed to get there? How will packaging be used to increase sales? What products does BAM leverage and how does that play into the sales and marketing strategy? standard Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 6 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Evaluation Criteria Comment Weighting Vertical/Industry Strategy Which vertical markets are being targeted? Which industry vertical markets and what types of applications are strategic? How is domain knowledge packaged and sold? How is domain expertise acquired within the company? standard Innovation What technology, deployment strategy or training approach makes the company and product/service unique? What patents are used in the product? Are they licensed or defended in any other way? In other words, what is the "secret sauce?" standard Product/Service Describe the architecture, pointing out specifics in each architecture layer. For example, with event collection, does the product support message queues, screen scraping, e-mail parsing, log file, change data capture, and SNMP-Traps? For rules, do you support thresholds, sequence and time-based logic? For alerts, do you support e-mail, SMS, IM and others? What context can be added to the event (enrichment)? What features are on the dashboard? How is drill-down accomplished? What analytics are included? Are there features for audit, user-based filtering, historical averages and so forth? What feature sets win over the competition? What is missing and why? high Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 7 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Evaluation Criteria Comment Weighting Market Responsiveness and Track Record How many verticals have been sold into? How many OEM partners are involved (if that is part of the strategy), and what kind of volume is expected from them? How many sales are sold as true stand-alones, without other core company products? What is the average selling price? Who is seen in competition? How many sales are in the pipeline? How many pilots are in process? What is the approximate number of customers and last 12 months' revenue derived from BAM platform products and services? Note: Customer numbers and revenue were requested, but we promised not to publish them. standard Customer Experience There are two parts to this. First, we describe the customer interface. How is support delivered? Is there an Internet-based discussion forum? How big is the system's integration business? How much customer interaction is direct or through partners? The second part is a subjective evaluation of customer delight, obtained through Gartner inquiry and references. We asked each reference customer to score the vendor on a scale from 1 to 10. high Source: Gartner Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 8 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Figure 1. MarketScope for Business Activity Monitoring Platforms, 3Q06 StrongNegativeCaution Promising PositiveStrongPositiveAxwayxCelequestxMicrosoftxOraclexProgressxSynderaxSystarxTibcoxwebMethodsxAs of 18 July 2006RATING Source: Gartner (July 2006) Vendor Product/Service Analysis Axway Axway is based in Paris and Scottsdale, Arizona. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sopra Group and has deep roots in the multi-enterprise integration market, supporting business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Its BAM product Synchrony BAM can be used as a stand-alone application, but is usually sold with Axway's B2B Integration gateway and BPM technology products. Synchrony BAM combines three BAM products. Sentinel is Axway's original BAM product. In 2005, it Axway acquired Cyclone Commerce, which was shipping Transaction Director and Insight, two BAM components that provided transaction track and trace. When used with Axway's B2B Integration Gateway, the three BAM products are integrated. For stand-alone deployments, the Synchrony BAM products are loosely coupled and are used, as required, by Axway's professional services organization. Synchrony BAM is more a BAM toolkit than a platform. Most sales outside industry packages involve custom development and systems integration. Synchrony BAM is typically deployed in monitoring supply chains, policy compliance, and transaction track and trace. Customers report that the product works well for business users, the BAM applications are sophisticated and Axway provides good support. With each reference customer discussion, a number of Axway products were used and the solution included a lot of customization. Axway's marketing strategy is to target its existing customer base to increase sales volume of Synchrony BAM and gain experience in deploying BAM applications. The base is weighted toward financial services organizations and those with supply chain requirements, especially in the healthcare and life sciences markets. There is also a growing presence in governments. Axway's indirect channels, such as HP and BearingPoint, sell into financial services and healthcare/life sciences organizations. Most of Axway's business is in Europe, but it aims to draw on the combination of its Cyclone Commerce acquisition, its OEM relationships with Lawson and a telemarketing staff to gain BAM sales in North America. It has developed two industry packages for Synchrony BAM: a vertical pedigree package to monitor the pharmaceutical supply chain and a horizontal package to monitor compliance with accounting regulations. Technically, the Axway Synchrony BAM product set is mature, but the advanced features depend on integration with other Axway products. Axway claims that its BAM product performance can Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 9 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. reach several thousand events per second. The dashboard graphics can be set to update in real time or on a refresh schedule. Complex rules are defined by an administrator, and users have the ability to create simple rules and control threshold settings using a graphical wizard. A broad range of rules can be defined, including analysis of forecast error, percentage of change and divergence from a standard deviation value. The BAM product issues alert notifications, while actions may be accomplished by triggering a workflow in Process Manager, Axway's BPM technology. Alerts are managed through an "on duty calendar" utility, which assigns incidents to specific users and tracks incident status. An incident audit feature is available to collect information about actions taken to address a problem, including e-mail, phone calls, processes and notes. An audit history file of events allows an event stream to be recorded and replayed. Axway has a rich library of adapters, including screen scraping, to capture events. This comes from its history in delivering B2B file transfer software and its current business in application integration. Its adapters have filtering abilities, and can be configured to send only events that meet defined thresholds. The Activity Monitor product can perform event validation and transformations. Consider Axway Synchrony BAM products for highly customized BAM projects or when adopting Axway's B2B Gateway and BPM technology. Its BAM products are functionally mature, but it is rare to find them used outside an Axway environment, and custom work is often required. Axway often solves its customers' business problems by combining many of its products, and is not focused on delivering an off-the-shelf BAM platform solution. Celequest Celequest is a venture-funded company founded in 2002, aimed exclusively at the BAM market. Its founders came from the data integration and BI markets. The product Celequest Activity Suite is a stand-alone BAM platform. Celequest focuses on the financial, manufacturing and retail markets, and typical software deployment costs are between 100,000 and 200,000. It recently introduced an appliance product that is licensed per hardware module, with unlimited end-user licenses. The appliance costs 75,000 to 175,000, depending on configuration. A starter kit with a guaranteed 20-day deployment service is available for 32,000. This includes systems integration help to implement up to two dashboards and 12 metrics. Celequest has a modest customer base served by its direct channel, but a strong and growing OEM channel is reaching into the BPM technology vendor community. With direct sales, Celequest targets VP-level managers in business operations and IT. The company's BI roots enable it to position itself as a real-time alternative to BI vendors, and it frequently partners with systems integrators to act as a trusted advisor for BAM project design and deployment. Celequest does not offer vertical industry packages, but uses vertical templates for demonstrations during the sales cycle, and includes these with the product as samples. Celequest reference customers we spoke to are happy with the vendor, but feel there should be some improvement in the dashboard's ease of use and performance. They see Celequest as responsive to their feedback and requests for new features. Each has chosen Celequest over other traditional BI vendors, rather than evaluated against other BAM vendors. The Celequest product processes events to update metrics and to identify patterns of interest. Events from multiple sources are streamed through an in-memory database that detects incremental changes in defined metrics. Events are not stored unless an external database is made available, but metric averages can be pre-calculated by using external historical data at system startup. Rules are defined in statements based on the SQL-99 standard with temporal extensions. The processing engine continuously evaluates the rules as metrics change. Celequest claims that processing capacity exceeds 50,000 events per second with millisecond processing time, and can support more than 2,000 concurrent users. The dashboard refresh rate defaults to four seconds, but can be configured to be instantaneous. The dashboard reporting Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 10 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. system, based on Adobe/Macromedia Flash technology, gives end-users a self-service approach to add new metrics, define thresholds and suppress alerts. A variety of alert publishing mechanisms is available, including an icon-tray alert window. Analytic functions include duration, coincidence, frequency, rate of change and sliding window. Drill-down and ad hoc reporting are supported from the dashboard. Predictive models are not included with the product, but historical and current views can be mapped together to show trends. Data security and user administration can be tied into corporate security systems. Metrics are persisted if configured as a sliding window average, and can be stored as a check point to persist averages over system restarts. An alert can be enriched with external data before it is published, but there is no facility to link an alert back to the dashboard. Alerts can be formatted to trigger external processes, and IBM's common event infrastructure (CEI) is supported. Celequest provides a number of event adapters, including connectors to message brokers, flat files and a number of business applications. Range checking and transformation features are available for pre-processing events. Custom adapters can be created using the Celequest Agent API. Third-party agents from iWay are supported for access to application event sources. Enterprises should consider the Celequest BAM platform for simple to moderately complex BAM projects that would benefit from a self-service interface for end users. Scale and ease of deployment are strengths. Projects of moderate complexity will benefit from external systems integration skills, and custom adapters will likely be required. Vendors of BPM technology products and applications that would derive advantage from BAM functionality should evaluate Celequest as a potential OEM source. Microsoft The Microsoft BAM product has been built into Microsoft BizTalk Server at no additional license cost since the general availability of BizTalk Server 2004. Microsoft's offering is not strictly a BAM platform product, in that it is part of BizTalk Server, Microsoft's business process server. BizTalk is included in this report because it can be acquired for a very low price. Entry price for BizTalk Server 2006 is US 8,500. At this price, BizTalk Server may be used exclusively as a entry-level BAM tool, but it does not rate highly against the other products in this report. It is a reasonable choice for those who are looking to build BAM projects with basic threshold analysis, are experimenting with what BAM can do, or who have skills in developing BizTalk Server applications and with other Microsoft products. Reference customer discussions indicate that the product works well within its limits, but we did not discover any instances of its use for sophisticated or high-performance BAM applications. Microsoft is promoting BAM to drive BizTalk Server sales. The BPM features of BizTalk Server are weak in modeling and human workflow, and BAM is useful during the sales process to add process visualization to proof-of-concept projects. The IT organization is still the most common user of Microsoft BAM, using it to monitor process flows and to view the flow of data among integrated applications. Most BizTalk Server sales are part of a larger Microsoft infrastructure sale that includes application development, database management systems, application integration and servers. The primary sales channel is direct, although more than 1,000 Microsoft partners have some familiarity with BAM. There are no specific vertical markets targeted for BAM, but Microsoft has BizTalk Server process knowledge packs, called "Accelerators," designed for finance, manufacturing, healthcare and retail. The road map calls for these knowledge packs to be extended to address vertical BAM requirements. As part of the Microsoft software portfolio, the BAM product has advantages and disadvantages. It was built as a .NET application, so integrates easily with Microsoft's other products, such as its SharePoint Portal, Business Scorecard Manager, Analysis Services, SQL server and Office suite. The disadvantage is that the work of integrating a complete BAM solution is left to a solutions Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 11 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. integrator or the customer's development staff. A complete solution can involve many products, which increases project and operational complexity. Microsoft BAM uses Office Web Components for an interface, and BAM-specific functionality is built into the BAM portal. An Excel interface is also available. These interfaces are static, requiring user input to refresh. When BAM is combined with the Business ScoreCard Manager, the visual appeal is still static, but much more compelling. Microsoft's BAM architecture uses the BizTalk Server pipeline mechanism to collect events. A pipeline can send BizTalk Server messages, data and process milestones to BAM, or connect to adapters to gather information from outside the BizTalk Server environment. A pipeline can apply processing to an event for example, adding data fields or performing quality verification. Some adapters are available with the BizTalk Server product and others can be obtained through a number of partnerships, such as Attunity, iWay Software, WRQ and others. The BizTalk Server message box acts as the persistent store for BAM data. Microsoft uses the term "alerts" to describe BAM rule logic. This provides simple threshold detection against metrics. Microsoft claims performance values of 2,000 events per second. Complex rules are addressed with Microsoft's Business Rules Engine, another component of BizTalk Server 2006. Examples of this are discovering a condition that lasts more than 10 minutes, or a process step will not occur before a deadline. Consider BizTalk Server with BAM for evaluation as a low-cost, entry-level BAM platform, especially when Microsoft application development skills are available. The product has limitations when compared with other BAM products, yet will meet the needs of many projects. It links multiple event sources, calculates simple derived metrics and compares metric values against static thresholds. Although the product can be used as a stand-alone, most Microsoft customers are integrating BAM with other Microsoft tools, especially SharePoint Portal and Business Scorecard Manager. Oracle Oracle acquired the foundation of its BAM solution Oracle BAM as part of its acquisition of PeopleSoft. The day before the acquisition was announced, PeopleSoft purchased the pure-play BAM vendor Istante (formerly named Iteration), which had been shipping BAM software since 2003. When PeopleSoft came into possession of the Istante product, Oracle was conducting alpha testing of its own internally developed product. The in-house version was shelved, and the Istante product was adopted as Oracle BAM. Because of this shift, Oracle delivered a competitive BAM platform more quickly, and one that can be run with or without other Oracle products. Oracle offers BAM as a stand-alone package. It is selling well, but will also gain momentum as a feature of Oracle Applications. Work is under way to include BAM in future versions of PeopleSoft and Siebel applications. It is already part of the Oracle SOA suite. Oracle sees BAM as a key component of its business process management suite technology, but also as an extension of BI, and intends to evolve its BI and BAM architectures to integrate tightly. In addition to applications and BI, Oracle BAM will also take advantage of other elements of Oracle's portfolio, such as portal, data warehousing, application integration and data integration products. Oracle sees its BAM product as a competitive weapon against other applications providers, especially SAP, which (as of August 2006) does not offer a competitive BAM product. Oracle is pursuing all channels to sell its BAM product, though most of the initial sales push is direct. The product has been showcased at Oracle's user conferences, in publications, at regional marketing events and in product demonstrations. Oracle systems integration staff and partner training programs are in place. Messages about BAM are included with Oracle Fusion Middleware and its business process execution language (BPEL) BPM products. Engineering and product management resources are involved in early adopter implementations, and the pricing is aggressive for pilot projects. Software licenses range from 150,000 to 350,000. A typical package includes two or three processors for BAM, priced at 30,000 per processor, and two Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 12 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. processors for the required Oracle database at 40,000 per processor for those who don't already have a database license. The initial success in selling Oracle BAM has been in the financial, manufacturing and telecommunications markets. There are no industry-specific packages available for Oracle BAM, but Oracle has an extensive partner community with vertical market specialties that it hopes to leverage. The Oracle BAM product has high-performance features. A display performance technique delivers an initial snapshot, then communicates only delta changes to minimize network bandwidth and increase display rendering speed. Oracle claims that it can support 1,000 active users on a four-CPU server, and process 50,000 events per second on a fully configured system. The event-processing engine of the BAM system is based on an in-memory architecture that stores metrics aggregates and evaluates rules without database round-trip delays. Metrics are persisted in a standard Oracle database structure for high-availability. BAM dashboards are designed to be developed by business analysts, although users can customize a dashboard and build new rules without knowing SQL or programming languages. A drill-down feature makes it possible to see those events or other business data. Actions can be invoked from the dashboard or trigger a process in Oracle's BPEL BPM engine. Events or alerts can be enriched with external data. Discussions with Oracle's customers and an integration partner indicated that the product works well, though there are some performance issues with report generation that are scheduled to be addressed in the next release. In each case, reference customers say that they would stick with the product. They felt that their problems with BAM projects did not reflect poorly on Oracle's BAM product, but were due to their own immaturity in choosing metrics and changing their culture to react to BAM alerts. Oracle BAM adapts to events and other data sources through an embedded extraction, transformation, loading (ETL) tool. This provides a library of adapters, especially to message queues, along with functions to validate, enrich and correct events as they are absorbed into the BAM system. Some specialty adapters are available, such as those suitable for retail point of sale and healthcare diagnostic systems. Oracle's adapter strategy will change as it integrates a different ETL product with Oracle BAM in a future release. Consider Oracle BAM as a general-purpose BAM system, especially if you use a broad range of Oracle's middleware and business applications. Oracle is strongly committed to its BAM product, so there is relatively little viability risk, but expect many functional changes in the next few years as Oracle integrates the acquired code with several of its own software products. Support and systems integration staff are available and are quickly gaining experience. Customers of PeopleSoft and Siebel applications will likely see future releases of those applications incorporating specific functions of Oracle BAM. Progress Software/Apama Progress Software acquired its BAM product along with Apama in 2004, and began shipping it in May 2006 as Progress Apama Dashboard Studio. This product is established in the financial markets as a high-performance event stream processing engine. Progress added a user interface, available as a client-side or browser-based application. Customers can buy just the event processing engine, to be used for event-driven applications, or purchase the engine with the dashboard, which work together as a BAM tool. Entry-level pricing is 50,000, and the average selling price to the financial industry is 300,000. The price is based on the number of users and CPUs. Subscription pricing and a hosted offering are available. Progress does not have an aggressive direct marketing strategy for its BAM solution. Instead, it uses its existing sales force to find opportunities within the large Progress Software customer base already using its application development tools, application deployment servers and enterprise service bus (based on its Sonic acquisition). Progress is expanding the market for its Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 13 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. BAM platform into new vertical markets, such as supply chain, defense and travel. Its approach to vertical markets is to build "SmartBlocks," which include industry-appropriate adapters, rules and reports. Sales representatives aim to engage the line-of-business managers first, then work with Information Services to develop a proof-of-concept paid for by the customer, after the business value has been identified. The Apama event processing engine relies on a continuous query principle to monitor events. The engine can process a live event stream, or replay historical events from a log file to search for patterns and test new rules. External information can be retrieved to discover correlations with the event stream. When a rule fires, it can change the state of the monitoring configuration and enable additional sets of rules. Events are stored after evaluation, so that users can drill down into the details that caused an alarm to fire. Although this is a powerful feature, it is complicated for business users to use. Rules are defined via a point-and-click interface, Java code or a scripting language. The customer's developers design a library of dashboards, which then are associated with user roles. Users have only limited control over the dashboard content. The product incorporates process awareness, and can identify deadline risks. The library of event adapters reflects the roots of the product in the financial industry, and is mostly comprised of links to message brokers. This is a weakness when competing in the general BAM platform market. An adapter toolkit can be used by Progress or its customers to adapt to other event sources. Data cleansing is accomplished through the rule engine, and is difficult to perform. Consider the Progress Apama Dashboard Studio for specialized BAM applications. It is best evaluated in financial markets where high-volume and low-latency complex event processing is required. Progress is just entering the general BAM platform market. Although the company has financial stability, a good BAM vision and an existing customer base, the product has not yet demonstrated a strong record of delivering value outside the financial market where it is known. Syndera Syndera, located in Redwood City, California, was founded in 2002. It is focused solely on the BAM market with its product, Syndera Operational Intelligence Suite. Syndera started ramping up its sales channel in 2005 and has recently hired additional sales and support staff. Its customer base is small, but it has been growing each quarter. Syndera has had good feedback from customers in its initial target market financial trading. This market demands high-performance event processing and real-time dashboard functions, which Syndera addresses with its in-memory processing and Adobe/Macromedia Flash-based user interface. Future target markets include additional financial applications, energy, telecommunications and healthcare. Its primary sales channels are direct and telemarketing, but Syndera is starting to leverage BearingPoint as a reseller and systems integrator. Syndera offers perpetual and subscription-based pricing, with typical annual subscription fees of 150,000 to 500,000. In addition, it offers a quick-start subscription and services package that licenses five users for three months for less than 50,000. Syndera's product is technically promising. It gives the user a lot of control, has an extensive set of arithmetic functions, blends current and historical information well, and uses a template approach to package industry application-specific knowledge. An object model is used to map events with technical, process and business dependencies, allowing different monitoring views for different users' needs. Events and metrics can be stored to enable historical and root cause analysis. There is an event adapter toolkit and a growing library of adapters. Event validation, enrichment and cleansing are done at the adapter level. Syndera claims event stream processing performance of more than 50,000 events per second, and aims to achieve five times that rate by 2007. The product is still evolving, but has a good architectural base, is addressing early adopter Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 14 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. requirements and has a good feature road map. Customers of Syndera report that the company is also a responsive partner in addressing custom requirements. Consider the Syndera Operational Intelligence Suite when looking for a high-event-volume BAM solution and a vendor willing to work with its customers' specific requirements. As a pure-play vendor, Syndera comes with long-term viability risks, but the clear focus on BAM is reassuring. The company is not distracted with bigger strategic products, such as BPM, messaging middleware or an enterprise service bus. Systar SA Systar was one of the first BAM vendors in the market with its BusinessBridge product, first delivered in 1998. The company evolved from a vendor of business service management systems for IT operations. Systar is a publicly traded company in France, with additional operations in Europe and the U.S., and is a pure-play BAM vendor. In addition to BAM, the same core technology continues to support the 20 percent of Systar's original business in IT-centric business service management. Systar does not sell a messaging system, a BPM suite or an enterprise service bus. Like other pure-play BAM vendors, Systar devotes most of its resources to the BAM market, but also offers significant deployment experience. While all other BAM platform vendors have less than 30 percent as many deployments in production, Systar has leveraged its experience to design an application layer on top of its BAM infrastructure. This layer includes components that are used to assemble a BAM application, such as "monitoring modules" and "expertise modules." This higher level of abstraction in building applications makes it easier to create task-oriented applications. For example, wizards are used to build applications that monitor deadlines, show the status of processes and to verify that a checklist has been completed. From a technical and experience point of view, Systar is a strong competitor. The biggest problem Systar has is a lack of brand awareness. While most of its sales have been in Europe, Systar has a few strong customers in the U.S. that can be referenced. It was previously hindered by a limited U.S. sales and marketing organization, but that is now expanding significantly. Systar uses its direct channels for 80 percent of its revenue. Targeted industry vertical markets include financial services and telecommunications, but it has also sold to utilities, manufacturing and insurance companies. IBM Business Consulting Services is currently a channel for Systar's BAM product, but volume will decrease if IBM's WebSphere group delivers, as expected, its own BAM product. Systar is expanding its search for OEM partners, targeting BPM, enterprise service bus and business application vendors. It also hopes to attract value-added integrators to deploy the Systar methodology and add new vertical applications. Systar packages its BAM technology in two ways. One approach is to address business operations, application support groups and IT operations with a generic platform dedicated to each of these groups. The other approach is to deliver specialized BAM solutions. A "bank payments" solution is now available, check processing is planned and several new solutions are expected each year. These specialized solutions are layered on top of its BAM framework, sold separately and are priced based on value. The average license price is 100,000 to 400,000 for generic and specialized applications. Training is usually sold with the software. Systar offers a fixed-price startup service that includes a deployment methodology and coaching services. The Systar presentation layer uses a browser-based client linked to the BusinessBridge server via a Web service interface. The default refresh rate is 30 seconds. Applications can be directed to a portal. Current and historical information can be presented on a variety of dashboard widgets. Hundreds of users can be supported. The correlation engine processes events and rules. Performance rates of 2,000 correlations per second are possible, and logic can direct specific classes of events to dedicated servers to improve performance. Classes of problems are detected by the correlation engine, such as identifying abnormal behavior, anticipating business Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 15 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. risk using predictive analysis, assessing the business impact as to which customers or commitments are at risk, first-pass diagnostics, and defining the margin of time where action should be taken. These features can be built with other BAM systems, but Systar includes them as generic applications to be applied to problems. Systar has a collection of 70 adapters, including terminal emulators, Telnet and Web page parsing. Events can be recorded for playback. Systar BusinessBridge should be considered for most complex BAM projects or when a pure-play solution is preferred. The company has deep experience in BAM and a well-developed methodology that increases the likelihood of project success. Its application abstraction approach to BAM is unique, and the functions it supports have been prioritized by customer demand. Some features are missing, such as a comprehensive incident management system, but overall, BusinessBridge represents the state-of-the-art in a BAM system. The biggest long-term risk to its customers is that the company is still small and may choose to be acquired. Its biggest task through 2007 is to grow brand awareness and a U.S. customer base. Tibco Software Tibco was one of the first application integration vendors to offer BAM. It acquired BAM technology in 2002 from early pure-play provider Praja, and has been shipping its BAM product, BusinessFactor, since 2003. Tibco sells BusinessFactor as a stand-alone BAM product, and also offers iProcess Insight, a lower-cost and restricted-use version that integrates with iProcess, the BPM technology Tibco acquired from Staffware. Tibco also offers a complex event processing product, BusinessEvents, which can be used as a preprocessing event emitter for its BAM tools. Sales of BusinessFactor are through direct channels, and more than 150 sales staff have been trained to promote the product. Much of Tibco's primary business aligns with vertical markets that have been early adopters of BAM: finance, telecommunications and healthcare. While Tibco has no specific vertical BAM solution, it has built up internal expertise addressing supply chain, information security and government vertical requirements. Systems integration support is supplied by Tibco. The marketing strategy for BusinessFactor reflects a recent shift in priority toward the iProcess Insight product. While BusinessFactor has been selling well, many of its BAM customers are still not in production with the product. Tibco's new strategy is to focus on BAM as a differentiator for its BPM technology, then work to upgrade customers to a broader BAM platform solution. Entry-point pricing for BusinessFactor is 50,000, although the typical license cost ranges from 300,000 to 500,000. The dashboard display of BusinessFactor is innovative. It offers a "what, when and where" screen layout, so users can set the scope and time frame of what they want to look at. The scope is selected via a Windows-style directory tree view. The time frame defaults to the current time window and can be rewound to set the context of how things looked in the recent past. The object location information is conveyed via an iconic mapping tool, which can reflect a geographic, schematic, blueprint or topology layout. Status indictors in the time frame window change color as metrics cross threshold boundaries. The time window shows when threshold values of key performance indicators were crossed. Rules are written in a scripting language, usually by business analysts. Dashboards are built by modifying pre-defined templates with a drag-and-drop interface. Users have enough control of the metrics to define personal thresholds and assign a color to each status. A snapshot of the "what, when and where" selection can be saved, and recalled like a bookmark or shared with others. The refresh rate of the dashboard is configurable, with a default refresh rate of 30 seconds. The dashboard is delivered through a browser or Java-based client. Event processing is done in an in-memory database, licensed from Oracle (formerly TimesTen). Tibco claims that BusinessFactor can process several thousand events per second. For applications using BusinessEvents as a preprocessor to detect complex events, more than 1 million events per second can be processed. When rules fire, actions can be executed by running a script or triggering a process model in a Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 16 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. BPM tool, such as iProcess. There is no incident management system included, but the system keeps a searchable record of alerts. Events collection is accomplished through a messaging system and a set of adapters. Tibco includes a runtime version of its Rendezvous message bus, and also supports the open-source Java Message Service. These tie into more than 100 Tibco Adapters, which connect into packaged applications, databases, network technologies and customized sources. Tibco's DataExchange product may also be used, if required, for data ETL. Consider Tibco BusinessFactor for moderately to highly complex BAM applications. The product works well as a stand-alone BAM platform, but for complex projects, you can leverage Tibco's systems integration team and the broad selection of products that Tibco offers to create an enterprise service bus environment. webMethods The webMethods Optimize BAM platform is derived from technology acquired in 2003 from a pure-play BAM vendor, Dante Group. Optimize is part of the webMethods Fabric suite, which includes application and multi-enterprise integration middleware, technology to enable business process management, a portal and a collection of Web-service-based adapters. While Optimize can be operated as a stand-alone, it is normally sold in bundles with other Fabric offerings, typically BPM tools and integration components. Optimize is aimed at business users. Another product, webMethods Manager, is based on the same technology, but designed for IT organizations to use in monitoring middleware infrastructure. Manager is more widely deployed than Optimize, and is building a customer base that webMethods hopes will ultimately use Optimize for BAM. webMethods is building packaged vertical solutions based on Optimize, and has hired industry experts to assist in delivering these solutions. A monitoring solution for catching violations of a company's compliance policies such as purchase order policy was the first vertical offering. Solutions for payment monitoring and demand fulfillment are also available. Optimize has been sold in to a number of industries, including financial and investment services, government, consumer packaged goods and manufacturing. webMethods uses a consultative approach to selling BAM. It conducts a return-on-investment discovery session with prospective customers early in the sales process. This identifies the business metrics to be monitored, the processes to be benchmarked and optimized, the organizations that will benefit and the magnitude of the benefits. In some cases, an organization is encouraged to deploy BAM before additional components of the Fabric suite as a way to raise process awareness and understand how poorly a process may be performing. This is an important tactic, which is needed to increase the deployment of Optimize. When Optimize is included with a bundled Fabric package, BPM and integration needs take priority over BAM and less than one-fourth of its customers deploy Optimize within the first year. The average selling price of Optimize is 300,000, though this may vary when it is sold with other Fabric products. webMethods is very aggressive in marketing Optimize, and it is frequently on the evaluation list of Gartner clients inquiring about BAM. Optimize collects events and maintains current and historical information about defined key business metrics. It has good event performance. webMethods claims one of its Optimize customers sustains a processing rate of almost 1,000 events per second. A rule configuration tool is available to develop metrics for monitoring process volume, velocity, context of the message content and faults. Syntax for defining temporal process rules is included, and used for deadline management or detecting trends in process behavior. The Optimize product has several innovative features for processing events. First, a metric can be configured to be watched by a statistical process that learns what normal behavior is, and then generates an alert if behavior becomes abnormal. Baselines are developed within 48 hours and can be maintained by the hour, Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 17 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. day or week. A 95-day sliding window history can be stored. Another innovative feature captures the state of all metrics when a rule fires, creating a signature for the rule that can be used to determine causality. Combining the behavior and causality features should generate early warning alerts before critical events occur. Although this is promising technology, in our discussion with webMethods customers, we did not find anyone in production who is using the behavioral or signature approach to rules. Optimize does not include a micro-workflow engine for enriching events or taking actions when rules fire, but addresses this requirement by configuring Web service calls to trigger pre-defined processes executed in an external BPM engine, such as Fabric. Alerts are configured with a pre-defined template, so that when the rule fires, contextual information is included in the alert. A simple dashboard, based on Flash technology, is included with Optimize, to provide a real-time view of metrics and keep track of alerts that have been configured to require acknowledgement. webMethods also offers an add-on product, called "Dashboard," to blend historical and real-time metrics, and present information from other data sources. The Dashboard offering has a richer set of BI features and is based on Informatica's PowerCenter Data Analyzer. The event adapter approach that Optimize takes reflects webMethods' philosophy that everything should be connected via Web services. Optimize comes with a Web service adapter to collect events from sources that support a Web service interface. By connecting to the webMethods Fabric suite, Optimize can take advantage of webMethods' extensive adapter library to access event sources. There is no event validation processing within Optimize, but this can be accomplished by catching poorly formatted events with validation rules and then using an external modeled process for correction or enhancement. The Optimize customers that we spoke to were all also customers of Fabric suite. There is general satisfaction with Optimize, but each provided examples of where the product needs to be enhanced. webMethods has been responsive to feature suggestions and holds customer advisory councils, but must work to address customer questions more quickly. Strong skills are required to deploy the product, and customers recommend using consulting services from webMethods. Alerts are powerful, and contain enough information about the rules triggering the alert that business users are not just aware of the problem, but also have an indication of its cause. In each case, alerts were the primary interface between Optimize and business users. Customers find the dashboard powerful, but it is more commonly used by business analysts and middleware support staff, because it is not user-friendly enough for most business users. Consider webMethods Optimize as a component of its Fabric suite. Optimize enhances Fabric because it can adapt to events within or outside the Fabric process model. Optimize can run as a stand-alone BAM system, and get its required services from third-party sources, but systems integration and ongoing support will be more efficient when Optimize is combined with Fabric. RECOMMENDED READING "Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes: How Gartner Evaluates Vendors Within a Market" "Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites" Acronym Key and Glossary Terms B2B business to business BAM business activity monitoring BI business intelligence BPEL business process execution language Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 18 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. BPM business process management CEI common event infrastructure ETL extraction, transformation and loadingGartner MarketScope Defined Gartner's MarketScope provides specific guidance for users who are deploying, or have deployed, products or services. A Gartner MarketScope rating does not imply that the vendor meets all, few or none of the evaluation criteria. The Gartner MarketScope evaluation is based on a weighted evaluation of a vendor's products in comparison with the evaluation criteria. Consider Gartner's criteria as they apply to your specific requirements. Contact Gartner to discuss how this evaluation may affect your specific needs. In the below table, the various ratings are defined: MarketScope Rating Framework Strong Positive Is a solid provider of strategic products, services or solutions. " Customers: Continue investments. " Potential customers: Consider this vendor a strong strategic choice. Positive Demonstrates strength in specific areas, but is largely opportunistic. " Customers: Continue incremental investments. " Potential customers: Put this vendor on a shortlist of tactical alternatives. Promising Shows potential in specific areas; however, initiative or vendor has not fully evolved or matured. " Customers: Watch for a change in status and consider scenarios for short- and long-term impact. " Potential customers: Plan for and be aware of issues and opportunities related to the evolution and maturity of this initiative or vendor. Caution Faces challenges in one or more areas. " Customers: Understand challenges in relevant areas; assess short- and long-term benefit/risk to determine if contingency plans are needed. " Potential customers: Note the vendor's challenges as part of due diligence. Strong Negative Has difficulty responding to problems in multiple areas. " Customers: Exit immediately. " Potential customers: Consider this vendor only if there are no alternatives. Untitled Document Publication Date: 16 August 2006/ID Number: G00142011 Page 19 of 1 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. REGIONAL HEADQUARTERS Corporate Headquarters 56 Top Gallant Road Stamford, CT 06902-7700 U.S.A. +1 203 964 0096 European Headquarters Tamesis The Glanty Egham Surrey, TW20 9AW UNITED KINGDOM +44 1784 431611 Asia/Pacific Headquarters Gartner Australasia Pty. Ltd. Level 9, 141 Walker Street North Sydney New South Wales 2060 AUSTRALIA +61 2 9459 4600 Japan Headquarters Gartner Japan Ltd. Aobadai Hills, 6F 7-7, Aobadai, 4-chome Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-0042 JAPAN +81 3 3481 3670 Latin America Headquarters Gartner do Brazil Av. das Na es Unidas, 12551 9 andar World Trade Center 04578-903 S o Paulo SP BRAZIL +55 11 3443 1509
