Earlier this month, IBM announced that it has integrated its FileNet BPM offering with Cognos 8 (which IBM also owns) and its business intelligence features. The company has also transformed its January acquisition of AptSoft into IBM WebSphere Business Events, a "BPM Suite" designed to ease and speed the integration of BPM, BI, and event processing.
Whatever one wants to say or argue about whether or not this is a suite or a portfolio, and whether or not it represents a new set of solutions or old wine in new bottles, this is a meaningful development. It demonstrates that:
1. IBM is serious about integrating its FileNet technologies with BI solutions;
2. IBM is serious about integrating event-related features and processing with BPM and BI; and
3. IBM is committed to integration of BI, BPM, and event processing with/via service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
This mirrors the continuing evolution of The Big Mash-Up in enterprises of all sizes and types. Increasingly, by my lights, anyway, users are seeing BI, BPM, and analytics as tools for answering questions about "who, what, where, and why," event-driven features and event processing as tools for answering "when," and SOAs as answers to "how." A construction that may be a bit inelegant, but begins to shed light on some of the forces driving The Big Mash-Up.
And IBM isn't the only vendor heading down this path. BEA Systems, for example, is talking increasingly about the "Event-Driven SOA." Oracle offers an "Event-Driven Architecture Suite," an element of what the company calls "SOA 2.0." And there's more to come, from familiar and emerging vendors.
This is a big and growing deal. If you'd like to read more about it, check out my Aberdeen Group Analyst Insight, "Building Event-Driven Architectures: Many Paths, One Mountain." And if you haven't yet done so, check out my Benchmark Study, "Performance in a Service-Oriented Architecture World," while it's still available at no cost for a now-VERY-limited time, as the marketeers like to say. (If you're quick and have 10 minutes to spare, you can still take my survey on application and infrastructure monitoring and management, which entitles you to FREE copies of the SOA performance study AND the report to be based on the survey when that's published. Such a deal, as we former Brooklynites like to say!)
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