"Business activity monitoring" (BAM) is a Gartner term that defines the concept of providing real-time access to critical business performance indicators to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations. Here at Blue Sky, we are extremely grateful that Gartner coined a term that so accurately describes our Insight application, although, to be fair, the term existed before we developed our application - it was just not yet on the famous Gartner hype cycle curve. Recently, Gartner published the results of a study designed to determine the real value of BAM. Some of the key findings were:

Latency - the most common requirement between an event and the notification of that event is less than 15 minutes Vendors - most BAM purchases were from IT vendors such as BMC and IBM/Tivoli or BPM (business process management) and BI vendors like Business Objects and Cognos Deployment - the majority of BAM projects are deployed in less than 3 months Services - the average services costs are less than the software license costs ROI - more than 80% of BAM projects have a positive ROI

Let's look at each of these findings as it relates to our Insight application.