BAM and SOA

Saw some talk (from David Linthicum and David Black) recently in the blogosphere on doing business activity monitoring (BAM) and business intelligence (BI) within SOAs. This is an idea I've been keen on for a while now. Wrote an article about it for DM Review last August.

The opportunity lays in the fact that SOAs have a holistic view of the business processes that are executing within them, thus they can provide the context that ties together the data collected from BAM or BI to provide actionable information at a business level versus just giving you the raw data that your analysts have to try to manually tie together. Combine this with the fact that you have standard XML messages from which to harvest the data from and it becomes a very attractive opportunity that organizations with SOAs should definitely take advantage of.

In his entry, Black goes a bit further to talk about how ESBs can provide a good platform for this stuff, which is essentially what I was detailing in my article as well. According to his blog, Black, who recently joined Cape Clear, will be working to help them add BAM capabilities to their ESB. This will be a great feature that will distinguish them from their competitors. I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for this feature to see when it becomes available.

soa, bam, bi, esb