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 NEWSMoving into real time By Jennifer Jones January 17, 2002 1:01 pm PT THE NOTION OF a real-time enterprise is no longer hype for Jon Ricker, president and CIO of The Limited's technology services group.
Now, says Ricker, make-or-break decisions are predicated on live data pouring in via real-time platforms and applications. For example, stores on the West Coast can react to "early reads" of East Coast sales figures and even rejigger floor sets to highlight fast-selling items before doors open for the West Coast business day. "We now have real-time information about what is selling in stores, instead of just [intuition]," says Ricker, who, as head of The Limited's technology services group, oversees the IT arm of the Columbus, Ohio-based retailer. It took some recent technology advances before real-time computing moved within the grasp of corporations such as The Limited. Previously, these capabilities were largely cordoned off in the finance industry, amid rarified groups that could afford the high-end messaging middleware almost always required for real-time business. But now, retail, manufacturing, and b-to-b sectors marked by intricate supply and distribution chains that mandate data sharing across applications stand to gain from the current surge in real-time computing, which promises to make vital information handoffs quicker. As the number of viable real-time vendors continues to swell and the price of solutions begins to decline, more enterprises will use the technology to better combine business processes and workflows. The result: much-needed cuts in both time and expense, vendors claim. "Real time is based on the notion that when something happens, you want to react to it," says Fred Meyer, chief strategy officer at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tibco, which played a major role in The Limited's real-time push. Several simultaneous shifts are now taking place on the technology landscape to give more businesses a shot at real-time processing to hone their competitive edge, analysts say. "The basic ingredients are all here," declares Roy Schulte, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. "Now we begin the process of digestion and assimilation. And we start applying the technology to business problems." Those real-time ingredients include advancement of Web services standards that promise to reduce intensive manual coding inherent in attempts to integrate enterprise applications. Working in tandem with this Web services ramp-up is bolstered competition among vendors hawking middleware messaging solutions that serve as a platform for real-time application integration Meanwhile, with major corporations in all vertical markets chasing real-time objectives, new-breed real-time applications are sprouting up across industries. Various vendors are offering real-time business-process applications they want to lay atop messaging platforms. Moving beyond batches The supply chain is one sector in which the push for real time is quickly making its mark. APL Direct Logistics, a Jacksonville, Fla.-based fulfillment company that ships merchandise to consumers, has installed a real-time enterprise software package from real-time application newcomer Yantra. APL uses the real-time system to move data across payment processing, authorization, and settlement systems. Furthermore, the company has harnessed live data streams to trigger alerts if packages will not be arriving at their destination as promised. "We now have no batch feeds to our suppliers," says Sally Miller, APL IT director, who is quick to drive home the crucial role real-time computing now plays in her market. "Our fourth-quarter [shipment and holiday volume] peaks to 10 [times] or 20 times what our normal volumes are the rest of the year. If our systems are not tightly integrated, the exceptions [packages failing to arrive as specified] would put us out of business," Miller explains. In fact, a main attraction of real-time computing is the opportunity to shed nightly, monthly, or even quarterly batch processing, when reams of sales figures or other data are routinely dumped from one application to another. These hefty downloads can easily stymie decision-making because it is only after batches are assimilated that executives begin the chore of puzzling together corporate snapshots from piles of historical data. By contrast, "the real-time enterprise, or zero-latency enterprise, is defined by the ability to provide access to information across the boundaries of an organization or technology," Gartner's Schulte says. Lewis Columbus, an analyst at Boston-based AMR Research, highlights the role of business-process data in real-time computing, adding that "in effect, this is about the ubiquity of data and the ability to bring multiple sets of data to bear on a problem." The Limited uses process modeling to underpin its real-time enterprise, says Tim Plzak, director of the company's Advanced Technology Group. Before implementing a solution from Tibco, The Limited began its real-time effort by asking, "Where are the gaps? Where is information not flowing because of batch processing?" Plzak recalls. Plzak notes that even the most benign batch intervals affect corporate decision-making. If those batch-processing routines take place each night, "we are still making decisions based on yesterday's data," he explains. Longtime real-time vendor Tibco refers to real-time processing as "event-driven" computing. According to Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive, real-time capabilities have already had a profound impact on business; without real time, "Intel would stop making chips," and Delta Airlines would have difficulty getting planes off the ground, he argues. Increased availability of standards-based application servers from companies such as BEA, IBM, and others will make it easier to build event-driven applications. Yet integrating batch-oriented legacy applications with real-time middleware has the potential to be difficult; because of its complexity, there is not yet a fixed path to the real-time enterprise. "Some functions should actually be handled as a series of small batches, rather than a stream of real-time events," Meyer says. "Given some caching around the batch operation, this gives real-time behavior throughout the remainder of the system, while satisfying [a company's] batching objectives." Corporations "have made massive investments in ERP, CRM, and all kinds of software with no ROI. They've ended up with silos they need to tie together around common events propagated throughout the enterprise," Tibco's Ranadive says. Ranadive holds up construction company Bechtel as an example: Initially, Bechtel was dispersed as "cells" around the globe; thanks to real-time technologies, it is now integrated. "If an architect moves a wall, electrical designers find out about it instantly [via real-time alerts] and are prompted to change the wiring layouts," Ranadive describes in his book on real-time computing, The Power of Now. That kind of interaction is made possible through "publish and subscribe" messaging technology that Tibco designed years ago with Cisco to eliminate the need for servers to constantly request data, Ranadive says. Using IP multicast networking, Tibco's real-time technology, called ActiveEnterprise, broadcasts information as it becomes available. Tibco last month unveiled a scaled-down platform option called BusinessWorks. Heavy on support for Web services standards SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language), BusinessWorks is designed to appeal to a larger enterprise audience interested in tackling targeted integration problems. The company is counting on the interoperability promises of Web services "to take this out to the mainstream," Tibco's Meyer says. "Now we will be able to go out to people in industries such as retail that were not able in the past to justify this kind of integration," he adds. Meanwhile, IBM has also stepped up its real-time application push, acquiring integration software company CrossWorlds. Because CrossWorlds' solution supports standards J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and XML, IBM sees the $129 million buy as a way to leverage real time across supply-chain and ERP efforts and take aim at vertical industries such as telecommunications and financial services. Web services adds competition Web services may cut both ways for entrenched real-time platform players -- the advent of Web services is allowing a flood of new vendors, according to industry watchers. "One of the big questions now is whether enterprises want to buy messaging separately from the company that gives them integration and services," Gartner's Schulte says. Another mixed blessing may be Sun's JMS (Java Message Service) platform, which blends Java and messaging technology for building Web Services. Armed with the JMS API, newer competitors are able to go after enterprise accounts once cornered by application server vendors and messaging powerhouses, including Tibco, Talarian, and Vitria. "JMS has given products like ours scalability," says David Chapel, vice president of Sonic Software in Santa Clara, Calif. He easily recalls a not-so-distant time when enterprises seeking real-time options had the choice of only Tibco or IBM, the "two kids on the block." Other middleware companies muscling into the once-sparse messaging market include Fiorano, Spiritsoft, and Softwired, Schulte notes. Tibco and others have jumped on the JMS bandwagon, too, building JMS support into both ActiveEnterprise and BusinessWorks, while Talarian this fall unveiled a JMS implementation, touting scale and development productivity gains for the enterprise. These technology advances have started bringing down the price of real-time capabilities and fleshing out the field of competitors. But it may not be quite enough to spur a heated rush for real time -- the current economic situation, combined with still-sizable price tags, continue to cloud the push for real-time capabilities. "This can get pricey," AMR's Columbus says. Given the cost hurdle, real-time capabilities may creep into enterprises through limited pilot projects, which start at approximately $750,000. Full-blown implementations can easily hit costs in the "tens of millions," Columbus adds. Despite this, there will surely be many enterprises willing to make the necessary investments for "holistic" gains similar to those The Limited's Ricker claims he has seen from the company's investment in real-time computing. In fact, costs for The Limited's real-time implementation were offset in part by foregoing incremental additions to supply-chain or back-office store systems. Thanks to real-time technology, the updates were no longer necessary, and The Limited saved time and money by avoiding the projects. "All of this has just lined up very nicely with our strategic direction," a confident Ricker says. Return to our Real-time computing package.
 Step-by-step Integrating real-time and batch systems involves several steps before things are up and running at full power.
Source: Tibco SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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