TIBCO takes EAI to new heights

by Jackie Zack

Competition, regulations, legislation, innovation, shifting business conditions ... all can drastically affect a business with lightning speed. Events that will impact a business's goals need to be detected as they're happening so staff can react appropriately. That is the goal behind active data warehousing (ADW) and business activity monitoring (BAM), and it's one of the compelling reasons for the partnership between Teradata and TIBCO Software Inc.

Scott Fingerhut

TIBCO and Teradata joined forces in September 2001 when the two companies noted increasing customer demand to bridge the Teradata Warehouse and TIBCO's enterprise application integration (EAI) products.

"Both companies saw the direction of our customers wanting to embrace both data warehousing and real-time strategies, and (we) realized that these strategies would ultimately come together," explains Scott Fingerhut, general manager of business optimization products for TIBCO.

That vision led TIBCO to create BusinessFactor, a powerful BAM solution that, with TIBCO's Teradata adapter, can integrate with the Teradata Warehouse to enable operational and strategic decisionmaking. BusinessFactor can then actively deliver and extract data from the data warehouse.

"The data warehouse is a treasure chest of historical information and information in the context of the business," says Fingerhut. "This context not only helps fill in gaps for better decision-making, but also provides a clearer picture of how a business might best choose to act."

BAM allows a company to monitor events actively as they occur and then relay that information to the appropriate decision-makers-both people and software. The two technologies are complementary. "A strategy around ADW is really going to open up the value of a BAM effort," he says. "I think there are a lot of pieces to BAM. The more you make BAM actionable and the more you make the information compelling and give people context to their decisionmaking process, the more the business can realize value from that. In preparation for that shift, BAM will be thrust more and more into the mainstream."

BusinessFactor provides a visual and interactive interface that allows managers to identify and address problems and opportunities in real time. A leading gaming company, for example, uses the product in conjunction with its Teradata Warehouse to help build and manage customer relationships. Instead of focusing solely on future marketing campaigns, this company implements realtime solutions to understand the personalities and gaming preferences of customers in real-time.

"Teradata and TIBCO allow companies to have a much more endearing and personal relationship with that customer so that they can maximize the relationship," points out Fingerhut. He believes ADW and BAM will continue to grow in importance by helping industries from healthcare to manufacturing to homeland security.

He adds, "Now, an ADW is a competitive differentiator. Five years from now, it will be a minimal requirement for companies in competitive industries that wish to remain in business."

Jackie Zack, a Michigan-based business, technical and feature writer, has written for several trade journals. T