Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

For almost two decades, Vitria has been harvesting data across networks and systems and using events to drive operational intelligence using the science of complex event processing (CEP). The company won the 2012 Ventana Research Technology Innovation Award in the category of Operational Intelligence for KPI Builder, and in past years its customer TXU Energy won our Leadership Award. Last year my colleague Richard Snow assessed how Vitria uses big data from sources inside and outside the enterprise to enable timely action across the organization. Vitria can parse big data in motion across the network through its correlation, workflow and analytic architecture and compare it with historical data to provide insights for those responsible for taking action.

The announced release of the Operational Intelligence 4 product suite is a significant milestone for the company, which has not always gotten credit for innovation and advancements that go well beyond traditional business analytics and business intelligence. The platform can operate on-premises or in the cloud. Vitria’s support for the cloud is a good decision, as our operational intelligence research finds that this approach is now preferred in more than a fifth (21%) of organizations.

Vitria 4 addresses the largest barrier to operational intelligence, the lack of resources (41%). Vitria has made it simple to engage with the technology, so any analyst or IT professional that has experience in using business intelligence tools and any knowledge of data can easily assemble metrics for analysis. The Vitria Launchpad provides direct access to the tools of the suite and applications designed for specific tasks. The focus in this release was to make it simpler to apply analytics – a smart choice, as our research found that defining metrics (37%), assign thresholds for alerts (35%) and presenting analytics in dashboards (35%) are the top three most important capabilities for operational intelligence. With Process Analyzer and Process Tracker users can define and apply metrics and view them in Process Discovery. This focus on in-context visual discovery is essential, as other technology approaches just represent the outcome and state of data.

Vitria’s approach allows for immediate root-cause analysis to determine where bottlenecks or issues occur, saving time and headaches for analysts. Using process metrics and presenting them visually but letting analysts see and adjust the underlying query and processing language makes this one of the most powerful products on the market today. Users can monitor events and use Vitria KPI Builder to provide intuitive dashboards, gaining the power of business intelligence against big data in motion and at rest. The software goes beyond the doldrums of traditional dashboards and basic business charts to create visualizations that are easy for anyone to understand and act upon. Having the ability to process data at any velocity is essential; not everyone needs real-time measurements, but people do need data at a pace they are able to measure and act upon. Giving analysts the ability to analyze critical event relationships such as thresholds, time and aggregation were the top considerations indicated in our research.

Beyond all the great capabilities is the usability of this new release. Our research finds that usability is the most important evaluation criteria in 62 percent of organizations. Vitria’s technology can be used by people in a variety of roles, from business analysts to managers, who want to see how the company is operating at any time of the day. The largest issue organizations have today with operational intelligence is not having access to all event sources; that has become simpler for analysts to integrate within Vitria 4 and its Analyst Workbench through the definition and connectors to event and data sources.

Vitria’s investments in its platform should pay off, as organizations’ ability to focus on action based on timely insights is becoming not just a mantra but a reason that organizations are reassessing their existing technology and architectural approaches. Not every company has deployed technology designed to mesh with its data and events across a network. Our research has found that those organizations that use specialized tools designed for operational intelligence are more satisfied (91%) compared to those that use generic business intelligence tools (76%). This is important, as many organizations are focused on cycling data quickly through processing windows and using business intelligence even though the data may not be in the proper context, limiting its value.

Vitria has made a major step forward in bringing operational intelligence and big data together to provide a powerful platform and tools for business and IT. It lets organizations assemble specific applications that can be deployed to address specific business process or departmental needs, giving it the level of customization that many organizations expect from technology today. The integration of Hadoop to handle big data and sources across the Internet, including Twitter, enhances the possibility of gaining more intelligence from an organization’s information. I am looking forward to seeing Vitria enhance access to and integration with information from smartphones and tablets for mobile users, and seeing it improve how collaboration technology can also enhance an organization’s operational intelligence network.

Don’t miss researching how Vitria can help drive more effectiveness and productivity in your organization. Vitria fulfills the operational intelligence vision of integration of business analytics and big data on a real- and right-time platform to support actionable insights on metrics that representing how your business operates.

Regards,

Mark Smith

CEO & Chief Research Officer