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Feed Me, Feed Me – Event Driven Analytics

The explosion of web feeds on the internet and now also within the enterprise rightly warrants the question “Is it possible to analyse feed data in real time?”. The answer has got to be a resounding yes and opens up new ways to use BI that go beyond traditional BI systems. Analysing feed data in real time may be of significant business value and pushes corporations into the new world of Complex Event Processing (CEP). New extensions to SQL are being developed by various vendors to allow querying of live event data. An example here would be Streambase.

Increasingly we are also seeing Enterprise Feed Servers (e.g. Newsgator) starting to be deployed inside the enterprise to aggregate RSS and ATOM feeds coming from internal and external sites so as to deliver relevant aggregated feed content to different people in different roles across the enterprise. Imagine if you could analyze feeds from news providers like Bloomberg and Reuters or if you could analyze messages as they flow over an enterprise service bus in a SOA. Sounds BAM doesn’t it? But is is more than that. Imagine RFIDs and the event clouds they generate. Looking for patterns in event clouds is what CEP is about. All this analysis happens way before data gets to any kind of data warehouse or data mart. This is a really high value return on investment opportunity to push BI systems into the world of ‘always on analysis’. The world of events and feeds are upon us. Time to get busy don’t you think? If you are doing anything in this area in your own organisation please share it with us, it would be great to hear from you.

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