Aside from the normal bug fixes that were in the previous release, Oracle BAM 12.2.1.(3) is a great improvement. Customers using Oracle BAM 12.1.3 should consider upgrading to 12.2.1.(3).

The three primary reasons I would give a customer to encourage them to upgrade are:

1. End user dashboard responsiveness has been performance vastly improved.

2. It is easy to detect trends and have Oracle BAM automatically send notifications due to its integration with Oracle Stream Analytics. This means Non-technical people can create queries and alerts based on pre-built templates such as:

• Top N Template - e.g., provide a rolling window of a specified number of items (e.g., order amounts) over a specified period of time
• Trending Detection Template - e.g., detect when order processing time in a specified rolling window of time is trending down by x% then output the time and trending values
• Duplicate Detection Template - e.g., If duplicate values are detected for a supplier and requester over a specified rolling window of time, the duplicated output is output
• KPI Alert Template - e.g., send an alert if processing time over the last specified time period is not within the previous average +/- standard deviation
• Missing Event Template - e.g., when an EDI file is submitted and the response is not received within a time specified, an alert can be fired
• Moving Aggregation Template - e.g., the moving average of dropped calls over a rolling window of time exceeds a certain amount then send an alert.

3. It might seem like a small thing, but list views can now be used to export to a CSV file.

Other improvements that I have already found useful include:

There were so many bugs and restrictions that were sold as "characteristics". Also, the support was poor.

There is a need to improve the dashboards design tools, stability, performance and stable connectivity.

Dashboards design tools:
Just a rich design tool is needed, because the Oracle BAM's reports designer is very poor, for example, it doesn't allow to set the font's names and colors. It is basic.

Stability:
So many times I have had to restart the server because of some stability issue. I do not know how to resolve this problem (because I do not know its cause) but I know that is a tough problem for the developers and analysts.

Performance:
The amount of memory used in Oracle BAM (called Active Data Cache) combined with bad data architecture in an application, makes the server slow and difficult to monitor. The need to use different artifacts to implement a solution (queues, database artifacts such as triggers, stored procedures, and materialized views). This makes the solution too complex and unstable.

Stable connectivity:
It was necessary to create external caches (queues) to ensure the communication between the Oracle Business Process Management (Oracle BPM) and Oracle BAM. This is nothing practical and unnatural.

Sometimes creating a new measurement could be difficult.