The Real Time Enterprise: Evolution to a Revolution

By Barry Briggs

CTO and Vice President, Development

AptSoft Corporation

Every day, companies forfeit millions of dollars in lost opportunities, and spend large amountscunnecessarily in day-to-day operations. That’s a surprising conclusion, given the belt-tightening and the intense focus on efficiency in today’s challenging economic environment. But it’s true.
Consider these all-too-common scenarios: A customer withdraws a third of her account from an
investment bank. For the fourth time, an online shopper places an item in his shopping cart – and
then abandons it. A homeowner notifies her insurance company that she’s moving.

Three days have elapsed since a promotional email was sent, and many customers haven’t responded.

Each of these represents a business opportunity for customer retention, up-sell, cross-sell or some
other revenue-generating event. But because enterprises fail to handle these events as they
happen, or don’t even recognize them at all, they miss potentially substantial opportunities.
Why? Let’s start with the IT infrastructure. Most enterprises have deployed a diverse variety of
front-office and back-office systems. Some of these are mainframe-based, while others are clientserver
or Web-based, and they come from sometimes hundreds of different vendors. Individually
these systems perform their specific missions well, such as supporting the Web site, driving sales
force automation, facilitating telemarketing, etc.

But frequently they do not coordinate with one another. Consider if the bank alerted its customer
service and sales force automation systems in real time when its customers liquidated large
percentages of their portfolios. Perhaps, by presenting new offers, the bank could ult imately
retain some of those funds. What would happen if on the fourth abandonment of the shopping
cart, the customer received an email offering free shipping?
By coordinating disparate business systems at the business-event level in real time, enterprises
stand to realize revenue streams they previously missed. This then is the promise of the real-time
enterprise. But given the state of modern enterprise applications, how can companies achieve the
real time enterprise?

Coordinating business events

A new class of integration software is emerging that places a lightweight layer of digital
“connective tissue” around key enterprise applications. Rather than requiring massive, complex
and expensive data pipes or warehouses, real-time event coordination servers recognize key
business events in applications (change-of-address, inventory low, large withdrawal, etc.) and
pass them on to other systems that can take advantage of these notifications.

Real-time event coordination embraces the diversity of enterprise applications, and recognizes
that business logic in those systems, which represents substantial enterprise intellectual and
capital investment, should remain there. Real-time event coordination simply makes the activities
of each system known to other systems that can exploit that information. Thus, event coordination
as a strategy for achieving the real-time enterprise recognizes the value of existing applications
rather than seeking to replace or re-architect them to respond to key business events.
What is a “business event?” The answer is that it is any occurrence that relates to the company’s
strategic goals. Because companies differentiate in order to compete, business events differ from
enterprise to enterprise.

Their business systems, however, are programmed to recognize and handle these events. For
example, a sales force automation system knows how to handle a new contact. A call center
knows how to handle a change-of-address. A point-of-sale system can handle an invalid credit
card. Real-time event coordination embodies the notion that these events may well be business-
(as opposed to application-) strategic, if only they were propagated to other appropriate
applications according to rules formulated by the business user.

Returning control to business users

A key tenet of unlocking the value of the real time enterprise is returning control of the business
to the business user. After all, it is they who are accountable for implementing enterprisestrategic
objectives, such as improved customer retention or better up-sell. If, for example, the
business user wants the abandoned shopping cart notification to go to the e-mail system on the
third aborted purchase, he should not have to call IT for help.

Modern technologies provide a “control panel” that business users can directly control and
monitor the operation and flow of business events through various applications, and thus measure
the effectiveness of the programs devised to meet the company’s goals. Such a tool cuts, or even
eliminates, the substantial cost of synchronizing business and IT departments as changes or
adjustments to programs are required. Further, these technologies reduce or eliminate the need to
create and maintain custom programming on multiple systems.

Of course, event coordination isn’t entirely free. One of the thorniest problems in systems
integration remains: data. Dozens, or even hundreds of applications in any given enterprise may
maintain information about key business objects: customers, products, trades, subscribers,
households, promotions, and so on. But their implementations, that is, their database record
formats, differ.

The most common solutions to the data integration problem are enterprise application integration
“pipes,” which translate one database format (and semantics) to another’s; and data warehouses,
which represent the union of some number of application-specific databases. Both solutions are
costly and deployment-intensive.
Real-time event coordination solves the data problem by providing the IT user with a tool that
scans existing data sources and abstracts key business objects, such as a “Customer Object,” or
Trade Object. These objects contain critical business information about their subjects. The result
is that these business objects become the “payload” of events.

Thus, when an e-commerce Web site fires a “Purchase Event” to the event-coordination server,
the Web site also sends “Customer” and “Product” objects along with the event. These are objects
that all connected applications can understand. This one-to-one mapping (system-to-object)
eliminates nearly all the complexity that current many-to-many integration technologies require.
Having then defined the key business events and the objects they carry, enterprises are ready to
exploit all the advantages of the real-time enterprise, including: handling every opportunity as it
arises; returning control of the business back to those accountable for it; and responding to
changes in business conditions in real time – all without replacing any of their existing systems.

Often, paradigm changes in enterprise computing are accompanied by great cost in capital
expenditure: servers, routers, firewalls and software to support the Web; a POP/SMTP
infrastructure, along with client upgrades for e-mail; and so on. Implementing the real-time
enterprise, by contrast, is evolutionary. By definition, it leverages existing investments in systems and applications.
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