IBM Acquires AptSoft to Expand Portfolio in Burgeoning Business Events Software Market

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is expanding its business event processing software portfolio by acquiring AptSoft Corporation, a privately-held software company based in Burlington, Massachusetts. Financial details were not disclosed.

AptSoft technology helps businesses uncover the cause-and-effect relationships among seemingly disparate business events that occur in milliseconds or throughout defined periods of time. AptSoft’s business event processing software further illustrates IBM’s commitment to pursuing the service oriented architecture (SOA) market opportunity and will complement IBM’s existing SOA software and related services offerings that span the WebSphere, Information Management and Tivoli brands as well as RFID and Web 2.0 capabilities and industry-specific solutions.

Business event processing software helps customers identify patterns and establish connections between events and then initiates a trigger when a trend emerges. The role of event processing is becoming increasingly important because it enables companies of all sizes and industries to proactively analyze and respond to minute market changes that can have significant business impact. This allows companies to seize critical business opportunities or mitigate risks before they negatively affect their ability to compete.

“We welcome AptSoft into the IBM SOA portfolio and look forward to further extending our leadership position in the business events market. AptSoft enables customers to capture events as they happen with an intuitive user interface designed for business analysts,” said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM WebSphere software. “AptSoft complements IBM’s SOA strategy and augments our business events capabilities to help our customers maximize their existing investments in SOA.”

AptSoft technology will strengthen IBM’s SOA and business process management (BPM) offerings through its simple, intuitive interface and correlation capabilities, which are designed to be easily used by business analysts and information technology (IT) professionals.

Business event processing can also be used in a variety of ways: in the massive multi-player online game industry for uncovering potentially unscrupulous activities among the tens of thousands of movements per second; by e-commerce vendors to help identify fraud and reduce abandoned shopping carts; by healthcare providers to inspire patients to make healthier lifestyle choices based on information pooled from various medical software applications; and by trading markets to uncover and compare minute changes throughout global markets to support buy/sell decisions as well as ensure the timely execution of bids. In addition, it can be used by retailers to proactively alert them about the success or failure of a product as goods move off the shelf, allowing them to make changes to pricing, inventory and marketing campaigns in real time; and by fleet management companies, to help them make instantaneous decisions on how to deal with products that are lost in transit or delayed due to unforeseen circumstances.

“As SOA continues to evolve, companies are linking event processing and BPM to gain deeper insight into the transactions and events that shape their business and industries as a whole,” said Frank Chisholm, former CEO and founder of AptSoft. “On behalf of the AptSoft team, we look forward to integrating AptSoft products with IBM’s offerings to help ensure the alignment of business and IT which will lead to greater customer success.”

AptSoft technology further extends investments IBM is making in business event processing and business process management, which include WebSphere Event Broker, WebSphere Business Monitor, WebSphere Application Server, DB2 Real-Time Insight and Tivoli NetCool products.

AptSoft products will become part of the IBM Software Group WebSphere software brand.