Database Technology Trends
Behind The Scenes of Database Technology

This is not an article on how to organize your next company party or sales event. Business event management (BEM) is a method on how to detect deviations of the effectiveness in your business and pro-actively reacting to changes.

Forrester defines business event management as:

“Business event management (BEM) is the process of capturing real time business events from multiple sources and assigning them to the appropriate decision maker for resolution based on the business context of the events”

The main focus is on the terms real time and multiple sources. This is the only way to intercept business processes that are out of control or are about to miss their target. Business process management is the method to ensure that a business process has a clear definition form start to finish with checkpoints along the way. Business event management is also known as cousin to workflow. Workflow management ensures that a single business process completes successfully and in a timely fashion. Whereas business event management combines multiple business processes, monitors its progress and let’s process owners know when things are about to go wrong.

Another term that is frequently used in combination with business event management is complex event processing (CEP). As CEP implies, business event management is a complex method to detect patterns that are exceeding a certain threshold or are about to exceed them. To boost the effectiveness of BEM, the pattern detection must be done in a timely matter to stop a bad situation from getting worst.

As an example, in the restaurant industry, fraud detection is a big problem. Detecting these fraud patterns as they happen would save an immense amount of money. Without BEM the detection happens after closing the books, a long time after the potential fraud happened, and a lot of man hour is spend to scan the transactions for irregularities. This is a good example on how BEM can apply complex event processing in real time to detect situations that exceed a predefined threshold. The timeliness of the detection is the real money saving factor in this example.

BEM doesn’t need to be a messenger of bad news. Monitoring positive situations is as important to a success of a business as preventing negative situations. Identifying positive situations initiated by an employee and recognizing this employee will not only boost morale, but ultimately boost the bottom-line.

There are many vendors that are offering their implementation of BEM. Most of these products are vendor centric, meaning that they are not capable of correlating multiple sources of event data. This defeats the primary objective of Forrester’s BEM definition. Other vendors went too far with their BEM implementation and made it overly complicated and unnecessarily complex.

I came across one tool that lives up to Forrester’s BEM definition without being too complex. It is called SmartScore. With the ability to connect to most known database flavors and even monitoring ftp servers and file folders, this tool has the power to combine many data sources for an effective pattern detection, which is the primary objective of BEM; monitoring multiple sources in real time.

Here’s the link to more information about SmartScore:
http://www.doblerconsulting.com/bem.html

This is what the industry has to say about BEM:

“Through 2010, the adoption of BEM platforms will grow at least 200 percent from 2006.”

Source: Gartner Report

“BEM’s real potential is at the business level, helping to enable new strategies, reduce operating costs, and improve process performance and other tangible areas of management attention.”

Source: Gartner Report

“The Business Event Management market will grow from $1.2B in 2005 to $2.7B in 2009.”

Source: Forrester

In my opinion, BEM is absolutely crucial to detect real cost saving opportunities and then constantly and consistently execute these saving measures. Especially in a down economy it is a question of survival if your business is able to minimize the cost to do business. Sometimes the only way to do this is with the use of additional software. This additional expense is Ok as long as the ROI is fast enough to benefit the cost savings in the long run. I believe SmartScore is the tool that can deliver.

Dobler Consulting Adds Sybase as Alliance Partner

TAMPA, Fla., October 13, 2008 – Dobler Consulting is pleased to announce the addition of Sybase, Inc. (NYSE: SY), the largest enterprise software and services company exclusively focused on managing and mobilizing information, as an Alliance Partner to its database management service business model.   The Sybase agreement positions Dobler Consulting as a valued partner supporting Sybase special projects.  The addition of Sybase allows Dobler Consulting to offer its clients across the entire range of business models access to Sybase database products and services.

Peter Dobler, Managing Partner of Dobler Consulting considers the agreement with Sybase as a first step in what he believes is a long term relationship with one of the world’s finest database companies.  Dobler Consulting has been working on Sybase projects over the past 19 years and having the agreement allows Dobler Consulting to access the many Sybase support services for its Fortune 500 Sybase users worldwide.  Dobler also is pleased to add Sybase as a partner to its World Class Data Migration services and BEM products all within the same philosophy of meticulous process management and execution.

For Dobler, it is not the technology that makes the difference; it is the preparation, the planning, and the skills to execute the plan that make the difference.  A recent testimonial says it best: “Dobler Consulting made this project for CCHS a pleasure from the moment we engaged with them.  Peter and his team are super sharp and professional. The Dobler team ranks top in this Data Management field. I would highly recommend them.”

For additional information on the news that is the subject of this release, contact Peter Dobler or visit http://www.doblerconsulting.com.

About Dobler Consulting

The company was founded by Peter Dobler who has over 20 years of database management and data migration experience.  Dobler Consulting is committed to provide turnkey data migration project management and data migration execution to delight its customers.  Its customer base spans all industry sectors with companies that have an annual revenue between $50 million and $750 million.

About Sybase

Sybase is the largest enterprise software and services company exclusively focused on managing and mobilizing information. With our global solutions, enterprises can extend their information securely and make it useful for people anywhere using any device. The world’s most critical data in commerce, communications, finance, and government runs on Sybase. For more information, visit http://www.sybase.com.

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Contact:

Peter Dobler, Managing Partner
Dobler Consulting
813-322-3240
http://www.doblerconsulting.com

If you are an avid social network user, you have heard about LinkedIn and/or Plaxo. These are the leading social network sites, especially for IT profesionals. So, what can you expect from these sites and which one is the better choice.

First up LinkedIn:

LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman. He started LinkedIn with the distinct knowledge he collected during his stay at PayPal. When eBay bought PayPal, it was not because PayPal was a superior money transfer program, but because of its member base. Armed with this knowledge, LinkedIn quickly approached 9 million members shortly after its first release. Now it has over 25 million members and it is growing at a rapid pace.

LinkedIn offers a free and a paid membership. The free membership is preferred for the casual user of the site. If you want to manage your connections more effective and possibily build new business via LinkedIn, the paid membership id recommended.

If you’re an Outlook user, LinkedIn offers a nice plugin that helps to keep your Outlook contacts up-to-date with changes in the LinkedIn information. This is especially useful if you have a large connection net and use LinkedIn as your personal address book. I really like to “Grab” function of the plugin. It allows to mark address information in an email and then automatically create an Outlook contact. It is very accurate and reduces manual typing.

My personal profile on LinkedIn looks like this:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/peterdobler

Next up Plaxo:

Plaxo was founded by Todd Masonis and Camron Ring. They realized quickly that the success of a social network site is messured by its free tools and integration into as many email clients as possible. 40 million members are living proof that integration and superior tools are key success factors.

Like LinkedIn, Plaxo offers a free and a paid membership. Instead of more communication possibilities, Plaxo offers more tools to colaborate in the paid membership. You can upload your Outlook calendar as a free member, but you need to be a paid member to synchornize your online Plaxo calendar with your Outlook calendar. This is very useful if you want to combine your private calendar with your work calendar.

Personally I like to Plaxo Outlook plugin better than the LinkedIn plugin. It is better integrated and I like the feature that downloads the Plaxo pictures into your Outlook contacts. When you read an email from a contact that has a picture it shows in your inbox. Very nice.

Here’s how my Plaxo profile looks like:
http://peterdobler.myplaxo.com/

Summary

Both sites are very reputable social networks with millions of members. I use both. LinkedIn as the primary network for all my contacts. Plaxo as the added information resource with a nice Outlook integration.

One of the advantages in combining both systems. Plaxo keeps track on its member’s birthdays. LinkedIn does not. But if you have a connection in Plaxo it downloads the birthdate and the LinkedIn dashboard will remind you to send a card.

I recommend both sites equaly and a membership in both is a good investment.