Application integration vendors including Tibco Software and SeeBeyond are building out their suites with analytic tools aimed at helping managers make faster and smarter business decisions.

As companies look to get more out of their IT systems, enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors are working to do more than simply plug together disparate applications. These days, business activity monitoring (BAM) is high on EAI vendors' lists of business-oriented add-ons.

Companies generate volumes of data that transactional systems process and databases store. BAM integrates and brings meaning to this information in real time so companies can reduce their operating costs and improve process performance. With BAM software, companies can use wizard-based tools to configure, track and analyze their performance metrics and quickly spot business problems, opportunities and trends.

For example, a company might use BAM to trace a waylaid cargo shipment or to monitor delayed flights. BAM differs from traditional business intelligence and data warehouse setups, which target business analyst users and tend to take on aggregate tasks such as sales forecasting or financial consolidation. BAM targets line-of-business managers and watches for operational events as they unfold.

A key part of BAM is capturing data. Thanks to their expertise with linking applications, EAI vendors already deal with reams of data flowing through their integration servers and messaging platforms. A company might use message-oriented middleware to transfer purchasing information from an order-entry system to a CRM system, for example. Adding BAM tools to put that captured information in context is the next step, EAI vendors say.

For its foray into BAM, Tibco acquired privately held, pure-play BAM vendor Praja in September. Last week, Tibco announced the first fruits of the purchase, unveiling Tibco BusinessFactor for business-performance monitoring and management.