Spotfire, a division of TIBCO, announced TIBCO Spotfire Operations Analytics, which allows customers to deploy real-time process-specific analytics applications and streamline business process control across the organization. The software embeds event processing into Spotfire's next generation business intelligence platform. With this announcement, TIBCO offers event-driven, closed-loop analytics software on the market for achieving actionable, real-time business intelligence (BI).

Because the role of IT organizations is to enable business managers to run their businesses better, there has been a constant need for aligning IT closer to business. We often hear business managers complain that a software solution isn't what the business needed. We have personal experience with this problem - in a previous life one of us worked for a consulting company that built turnkey applications for large enterprises.

On the one hand, there's extreme pressure on businesses to deliver new customer offerings and innovative business capabilities, match increased competition, and deal with new partners and providers of niche services to offer cheaper service. On the other hand, most of us have legacy systems that prevent us from delivering to the business at the speed of business opportunities. Legacy applications house only parts of the business entity and the data is stored in proprietary structures.

Server virtualization provides an immediate reduction in hardware and configuration cost. But in focusing merely on the hardware side of virtualization, are we leaving money on the table? While organizations can reduce the number of boxes they need, and save the cost of replicating servers for virtual test beds, these servers are becoming commodities.

In our daily personal interactions with businesses of all sizes we all experience sub-optimal business processes. How many times have you tried to buy an item of clothing only to find that the store doesn't have your size? Then when you ask the shop assistant, he responds that a new delivery is expected on Wednesday, but he doesn't know whether that particular item will be included. Check back on Wednesday? Familiar? Of course, we're all so used to these kinds of experiences that we accept them as normal.

'A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.' - Groucho Marx. People have begun to understand that a properly implemented SOA has the potential to improve business agility and adaptability to changing business conditions, but we're still suffering from at least one innate prejudice common to IT folks.

One of the hardest things for most IT departments is change. Not only do they have to cope with the technology change that is inherent in their business, they have to cope with all sorts of other change - regulatory changes, business changes, competitive changes, requirement changes, process changes, policy changes. All this change creates a maintenance nightmare so that in many IT shops most of the time is spent not in building cool new applications but editing and 'fixing' code in old systems. Business rules, one of the fastest-growing markets in application development technology, offers a way to stop worrying about change and learn to love it.

Mainframes were the first computing platform of corporate information technology. As the industry has grown, mainframes have continued to evolve and integrate into the various incarnations of enterprise architecture. In fact, as the first computing system, mainframes enjoy a special role when looking at enterprise architecture, as mainframes have participated in virtually every flavor of architecture, starting with the incarnation of IT, when a mainframe was the architecture.

A large company found itself handicapped by an ornery snarl of siloed applications that compromised its agility, performance, and profitability. Its IT department was constantly behind schedule and over budget in hand coding point-to-point connectivity among supply chain, financials, CRM, and other packaged and custom-built legacy applications.

Enterprises are increasingly feeling the need for shorter lead time for decision making, the need to extract and present KPI (Key Performance Indicators) to management, and the need for enhanced response capability. These business needs are not in sync with the technological challenges such as the presence of heterogeneous technologies and disparate enterprise systems (e.g., ERP, SCM, CRM, etc.). This situation gets complicated with the increasing number of mergers and acquisitions resulting in the various business units within an enterprise having their own data warehouses. Adding to this is the increasing number of users inside and outside the enterprise who need real-time access to information.