In response to market demand for more real-time business information, Oracle announced Friday it will offer a BAM (business activity monitoring) tool, Business Activity Manager, as part of an upgrade to its application server software due out in the middle of the year.

The BAM component will run on the existing Oracle10g Application server, released at the start of the year, and on Application Server 10.1.2, due out midyear. It will not run on earlier releases such as Application Server 9i, according to Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle Server Technologies.

Included in Business Activity Manager are the ability to detect, correlate, and analyze separate events such as RFID scans, bar code readings, or events out of an enterprise application or a supply-chain process event.

The idea is to provide businesses with near real-time data about events happening in their business, such as the failure of a parts shipment to arrive, and to understand how that event will impact other parts of a business, such as its ability to deliver finished products.

"The more lean you run your business, the more an event has a bigger impact on your operations," he said.

Kurian said the the BAM application is unique in that it can correlate both traditional historical events out of a data warehouse with real-time events.

"It is the only tool that combines both, and it can kick off a business process," said Kurian.

Oracle also said its Customer Data Hub, which lets users gather information about customers from a variety of locations and store it in a single repository, will be offered as a standalone product in the middle of the year. It currently ships as part of Oracle's E Business applications suite.

Pricing for the Business Activity Monitor and Customer Data Hub will be announced nearer the products' release, Kurian said.