IBM is looking to beef up its service-oriented architecture portfolio
by buying AptSoft, a private company that develops infrastructure
software to help companies determine cause-and-effect relationships
between business events. AptSoft, based in Burlington, Mass., develops
software that falls into the complex event processing category of
software that works within a SOA (service-oriented architecture)
framework to help trigger BPM (business process management) events.
AptSoft's software spans a number of areas in IBM's vast product
portfolio groups, including WebSphere, Information Management and
Tivoli. IBM also plans to fold AptSoft into newer product categories
that include RFID and Web 2.0 capabilities, areas where IBM has ramped
up investment over the past couple of years. Complex event processing
software helps companies identify patterns and establish connections
between events. Once the software determines a trend in events --
whether they occur over a millisecond or over hours or days -- it
initiates a business process trigger. AptSoft's namesake Director
for CEP is a platform that runs on a company's network, where it
monitors and correlates activities across applications, Web services,
databases and devices, according AptSoft. Based on user-defined rules,
the software detects events or patterns -- a new customer is added,
a product is sold but a shipment isn't scheduled, a prospect researches
the same topic on a company's Web site for a week --- and then
orchestrates the disparate elements of the infrastructure to execute
a process. Where AptSoft fits into IBM's SOA strategy is in its ability
to enable a SOA framework that supports what AptSoft refers to as a
new class of composite applications (those applications that are made
up of) Web services, events from services and events from an event
cloud of people, devices, applications, databases and networks.
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