What’s great about covering technology is that it’s always evolving, so there’s always something new.
What’s not so great: There’s always a new Three Letter Acronym (TLA).
Case in point: Gartner’s identified a new trend where businesses are integrating analytics with their business processes and the supporting applications. Basically, they do this by adding on to their existing business process management systems (BPMS).
And, of course, Gartner came up with a TLA for this new strategy: “intelligent business operations,” or IBO.
You have no idea how hard it is for me not to snipe at this one.
Gartner seems to think this is a major trend; so much so, it’s redefined its BPM Magic Quadrant report as the new iBPMS report to reflect adding “intelligent” to BPM. It also warns that you shouldn’t compare this new Magic Quadrant to last year’s BPMS report, because this changes everything.
“IBO represents a significant shift in BPM tool capabilities, and the iBPMS Magic Quadrant evaluates vendors against the new capabilities required to satisfy the IBO use case,” the report notes. “Our research indicates that the IBO use case represents the future of BPM tools and is experiencing rapid adoption. We believe all organizations, not just early adopters, need to factor IBO into their BPM planning horizons.”
The report also looks at the 10 core components of iBPMS.
Appian, Pegasystems and IBM rank as leaders in intelligent business process management so Appian and Pegasystems are offering it for free download. If you don’t like to provide basic user information to vendors, then you can always buy the report from Gartner for a mere $1,995.
In other news:
Varonis DatVantage 5.1
Varonis Systems released 5.8 of its data governance tool, Varonis DatAdvantage. What you need to know: The new version includes a new management console, schedule and common line interface, as well as the ability to handle incremental file walk rather than doing the entire file structure daily. It also includes a new component that no longer requires Microsoft SQL to collect metadata. Use case: If you’re considering a data governance tool.
Opera Meets Pervasive DataRush
Opera Solutions, an advanced analytics vendor that deals with Big Data, is now using Pervasive DataRush as part of its Signal Hub technology stack. What you need to know: This makes SignalHub faster. It also adds a range of built-in data manipulation and predictive analytics operators, plus the ability to add its own advanced data science functions. Use case: You need advanced or predictive analytics, and it needs to be fast.
Using R for Map Reduce Tasks
Revolution Analytics is sponsoring the RHadoop project, an open source initiative. It recently released version 2 of the rmr package. What you need to know: It makes it possible for R programmers to write Map Reduce Tasks in the R language and run within the Hadoop cluster. Use cases: The new release also adds some convenience functions, including the ability to take random samples from datasets stored in Hadoop.
New Version of Kapow Katalyst Application Integration Platform
Version 9.1 of Kapow Katalist Application Integration Platform features improvements to usability and data visualization, the company announced this week. What you need to know: This release is focused on Big Data. Also, Kapow unveiled a new licensing model that scales to your company’s “dynamic capacity requirements” and a new on-demand “compute unite” (their words, not mine) license model that offers usage-based pricing. Use cases: The BYOD crowd, which Kapow is targeting sales and marketing with this release. The average sales person spends approximately 24 percent of their time searching for information before sales calls, according to a CSO Insight report cited by Kapow.
