IBM's AptSoft acquistion opens SOA event processing to line of business personnel

IBM has beefed up it's business process management (BPM) offerings in the service oriented architecture (SOA) space with today's announcement that Big Blue is acquiring AptSoft Corp., Burlington, Mass., a provider of business event-processing software. The move also extends event-processing capabilities to line-of-business personnel.

Business event processing identifies event patterns, connections between events, and allows users to establish triggers for action when certain trends appear. As SOA extends the reach of businesses and incorporates data and transactions both from inside and outside the enterprise, identifying both positive and negative trends can aid the company in responding quickly to either opportunities or threats.

IBM already has event-processing offerings in their portfolio, but according to Ed Lynch, business integration portfolio product manager, what AptSoft brings to the table is a set of tools that takes these capabilities out of IT and puts them in the hands of business people. It also moves event processing out of its traditional niche in financial services and enables it across industries and sectors.

Retailers, for example, can use event processing to proactively alert them about the success or failure of a product as goods move off the shelf, allowing them to make changes to pricing, inventory and marketing campaigns in real time; and by fleet management companies, to help them make instantaneous decisions on how to deal with products that are lost in transit or delayed due to unforeseen circumstances.

AptSoft is privately held, and neither company released the financial details of the deal. The AptSoft offerings will be wrapped into the WebSphere brand.