OpsFactor unveiled Extending its reach in BAM (business activity monitoring), Tibco Software on Tuesday began shipping OpsFactor 1.0, which provides insights into business operations being orchestrated by the company’s business integration software.Leveraging the company’s BusinessWorks integration platform as a source for process content, OpsFactor features dashboards that display real-time information, operational metrics, and key performance indicators that reflect business goals and conditions, according to Tibco. Business and IT managers can understand performance and impact of processes to enable them to be proactive in adjusting resources to business objectives.Users of OpsFactor can add activity sensors to any step or sub-step in a process, define threshold levels to identify exceptional events, and configure “rollup rules” to aggregate related metrics into meaningful information. OpsFactor uses the BusinessWorks interface. BAM differs from business intelligence in that information is polled directly from the message infrastructure rather than from a data mart, said Scott Fingerhut, general manager of business optimization at Tibco. Thus, there is no latency. While business intelligence is about providing analytical views of information, “Our focus is on the operational,” Fingerhut said.BAM provides information on recent processes while business intelligence has more of a deeper, analytical focus, according to Fingerhut. Also, BAM is less expensive and takes only a week to get up and running, while business intelligence can take months, he said.OpsFactor generates monitoring models, scorecards, and dashboards. Key components include an embedded light version of Tibco BusinessFactor 4.2, enabling aggregation and monitoring of events; a palette design module; and a browser-based BAM desktop providing alert management, scorecards, and customization control. Also featured is an advanced analysis client for identifying performance issues. OpsFactor prices start at $125,000 per server. Software Development