Real-time business intelligence you can act on

Recently, I read a post called Real-time business intelligence you can act on, written by Ephraim Schwartz in his InfoWorld's blog. He starts the post writing: "Continuous intelligence promises to improve the pace of business -- and the bottom line" and "Sometimes changing the name of a product isn't just marketing sleight of hand, rather it actually succeeds in giving potential customers insight into the true purpose of the product at hand."

He is talking about the use of CEP (Complex Event Processing) technology, that some people prefer call CI (Continuous Intelligence), as for example the Coral8 CEO Terry Cunningham, that he found.

What CI attempts to do is to remove the divide between the transaction and query systems.

When you eliminate lag time between OLTP (online transaction processing), event analysis, and the automated execution of a subsequent event, you end up with a very powerful tool.

Whether you call it CI or CEP, this tool isn't new. It has found a home for many years in the financial services industry, where CEP enables trading houses to track and store in real time the universe of equities, including derivatives at the rate of 50,000 events per second during peak trading hours.

Cunningham said:
"It is physically impossible to do real-time data processing in a traditional data warehouse. By the time you collect the millions of bits of data, minutes or even hours have gone by, while your business may require answers in milliseconds.

CI is not necessarily a replacement for a data warehouse. Some CI applications may still require that the data be put in context, and that happens when it is merged with the information from a data warehouse.

If you calculate the volume weighted average price of a stock at $26.50, you won't know if that is good or bad unless you look up the history."

The concept of CI isn't new even in retailing. The change now is that the concept can be actualized.

CI will improve the way the companies do business. Business problems are getting more complex, and applications need to keep up.

Gartner Event Processing Summit 2008

The Gartner Event Processing Summit 2008 happened this month (15 - 16 September 2008 - Stamford, CT) and here are some links with posts and articles commenting on the conference:

- Intelligent Enterprise
. Event Processing Meets Text: Reuters at Gartner - Seth Grimes
. Event Processing Summit Image Gallery: Getting to Real-Time

- Tibco's Blog - Paul Vincent
. Gartner Event Processing Summit 2008: highlights
. Gartner Event Processing Summit 2008: overview

- Colin Clark on Event Processing
. Gartner Event Processing Summit - Day 1
. Gartner Event Processing Summit - Day 2

- Complex Events Processing
Wall Street Systems Announces Partnership With Aleri to Enhance its FX Trading Solution with CEP Technology

- Opher Etzion's Blog
On Gartner EPS 2008

- Event Processing Blog - Louis Lovas
Thank You Gartner - Event Processing Conference #1 In the Books

Choosing BI, BAM or CEP

Intelligence Enterprise published a very nice article today, by Doug Henschen, where Gartner analyst Roy Schulte answered questions about event processing (EP).

Roy Schulte did several interesting comments:
- The event processing (EP) are coming in three varieties: low-latency BI dashboards, lower-latency Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and ultra-low-latency complex event processing (CEP).

- The BI vendors are certainly moving toward BAM. If you put up a BI dashboard and you're refreshing it, say, every ten minutes, which you can do with any BI dashboard, then you are doing BAM with traditional BI tools. BAM is really a style of deployment rather than a distinct technology type, so I would say BAM can be done with traditional BI tools.

- When it comes to low-latency BAM, where you're trying to refresh the dashboard every few seconds, traditional BI tools aren't fast enough. That's when you need BAM products that are purpose-built to run fast.

- If you're doing something that involves a human being, you probably don't need CEP. People can't work that fast, so in those applications you may be able to use BI or BAM. When you're dealing with machine speeds, that's where CEP comes in.

- Customer experience management is a great use for CEP because you can't control it, you can't predict it, it's high volume and it's continuous.

- I'm excited about BAM — not necessarily the term "BAM," because most people don't use it, but the concept. I think this whole approach of creating dashboards and giving visibility to business people is such a big win.

I think the concepts and technologies are evolving dramatically, so you should consider carefully your need, choose the right technology, and start with the right architecture.

DM Radio presents: On The Cutting Edge with Operational Analytics

Tomorrow, September 4th, at 3:00 PM ET, will happen a live Web broadcast presentation entitled On The Cutting Edge with Operational Analytics, provided by DM Review, in its initiative called DM Radio, hosted by Eric Kavanagh with Jim Ericson.


According DMReview: "For companies on the cutting edge, operational analytics can provide real-time insights that improve corporate performance significantly. Whether for operational reporting, real-time analytical reporting or business activity monitoring (BAM), operational analytics deliver the kind of information that can successfully guide organizations through even the most challenging situations.

Getting the necessary ducks in a row to accomplish this type of business intelligence can be quite a challenge, however. Dashboards, real-time integration, key performance indicators and powerful analytics are all part and parcel to such solutions. And then there's the foundation: are traditional data warehouses suitable for this task? Or are new technologies such as complex event processing (CEP) and event stream processing (ESP) necessary?

Tune into this episode of DM Radio to hear from the experts – including Forrester Research Analyst Boris Evelson and industry consultant John Ladley of IMCue Solutions – about how your organization can use operational analytics to achieve a competitive edge.

Attendees will learn:
- how CEP and ESP can facilitate operational analytics
- why traditional data warehousing approaches may not be sufficient
- the building blocks necessary for operational analytics
- where companies are employing this kind of functionality
- why understanding KPIs is critical to success
- how to link operational analytics with performance management
- why data quality problems can derail the most robust solution"

In the DM Review website, you can register for this live Web broadcast.

You also can check out the DM Radio archives to hear previous programs with a variety of other issues.