HP and Accenture co-develop event monitoring tool

HP and Accenture have joined forces to develop near real-time event monitoring tools enable more comprehensive business intelligence optimisation.

The product is based on HP's Business Process Insight (BPI) software - produced by the division that also incorporates the acquired business process optimisation vendor, Mercury Interactive - and looks to extend the benefits of BI by cutting the time it takes to build and deploy real-time business activity and process management tools.

The BPI technology combined with Accenture's business-specific process expertise to increase the functionality of existing BI software investments by delivering more granular reporting on business operations, along with more detailed information on the causes of process bottlenecks or latency.

Antonio Almeida, event monitoring global programme lead at Accenture told IT PRO that, no matter how good the information delivered with BI is, it often fails to identify the root causes of issues or the break down of the processes it monitors. "It's like trying to drive a car through the rear-view mirror, very difficult," he said.

Chris Tracey, worldwide Business Process Insight product manager at HP said it could also cut the development and deployment times of adding such additional functionality into existing BI packages internally.

"We use the existing BI technology and data to look at events from an application infrastructure perspective, as it relates to the business process model," said Tracey.

The HP/Accenture product can deliver BI reports in intervals that are as near real-time as minute-to-minute and has been used by the First National bank of Arizona in the US to streamline its mortgage loans procedures.

Patrick Lamb, president of First National Bank of Arizona's Mortgage Division said the event monitoring pilot has shown how it could make better and quicker decisions by providing near-immediate transparency to our mortgage loan process.

"It would enable us to pinpoint issues within an hour of them occurring and take remedial action far sooner than we could have done before - potentially providing us with substantial savings and some extra revenue," said Lamb.

Accenture and HP signed the agreement to deliver the joint offering over 12 months ago, but are only now publicising it following its successful pilot and implementation in real customers' infrastructures, like that of First National.

Miya Knights

A 25-year veteran enterprise technology expert, Miya Knights applies her deep understanding of technology gained through her journalism career to both her role as a consultant and as director at Retail Technology Magazine, which she helped shape over the past 17 years. Miya was educated at Oxford University, earning a master’s degree in English.

Her role as a journalist has seen her write for many of the leading technology publishers in the UK such as ITPro, TechWeekEurope, CIO UK, Computer Weekly, and also a number of national newspapers including The Times, Independent, and Financial Times.