For some time now, StreamBase has been working on a new product concept that's a little bit CEP, a little bit data warehouse, and a little bit business intelligence. Today we've unveiled it as StreamBase LiveView. Our customers have called it a "game changer," and a product that "fills a massive hole in the BI space." Hyperbole like that needs to be backed up, so here we go.
Complex event processing (introduction on Google+) was envisioned by its inventors as a "database for moving data" as firms increasingly deal with data in motion from mobile devices, social media and digitized data of all types, and in all industries. In its first decade of commercial use, CEP has come to power automated trading on Wall Street. A who's who list of firms have been public about their adoption of CEP, so let's examine the live BI problem in the context of Wall Street.
Industry analysts estimate that over 60% of U.S. equities trading is automated. The problem is, with so much automation, it's impossible to see and act on what's going on, because a typical trading environment can generate 10's of millions of events a day. Existing business intelligence and data warehouse tools aren't used in the front office of Wall Street, because they're designed to summarize what's already happened, not what's happening now.
StreamBase LiveView brings BI and streaming data together, for the first time. Applications that need Live BI are everywhere on Wall Street - trading risk management, position management, P&L management, surveillance, compliance, and trading itself, as Waters Technology magazine describes in the article that StreamBase Seeks 'Radical Transparancy' in Business Intelligence.
And applications in other markets can be found in any environment that has big data in motion: telecom (location aware insight and live network operations), security (live fraud detection, live surveillance), and e-commerce (live social media analytics, ad placement, big streaming analytics for Hadoop and Flume). These apps can be deployed on premise or distributed in the cloud.
StreamBase LiveView is built with StreamBase CEP, which provides connectivity to over 125 event-based sources of data and the extreme scalability required by live BI. The server-based architecture is designed to process hundreds of millions of events per node, absorbed from a network of event sources such as an enterprise message bus or scalable event absorption layer like Flume or IBM Streams. At the front end, users can slice and dice streams of data with ad-hoc query tools in the StreamBase LiveView Desktop (shown above). But here's the key: once users ask the questions they want answered, StreamBase LiveView keeps answering their questions - as conditions change in real-time; users see an always-live view of streaming data.
For the user, all this technology means just one thing: they see business intelligence that's constantly fresh and relevant to their business operations. It's not a view of 5 days ago, or even 5 minutes ago. The data is live, the insight is live, and live insight can lead to live action.
Facebook, Twitter, Google+ give us a live view of what's happening in our social networks; StreamBase LiveVew gives firms a live view of their enterprise data.
To learn more, watch the StreamBase LiveView presentation, follow new materials, articles, and resources on Google+ (+StreamBase and CEO +Mark Palmer), read industry analyst Curt Monash, DMBS2.0, or follow StreamBase Systems (@streambase), CEO Mark Palmer (@mrkwpalmer ), and CTO Richard Tibbetts (@tibbets) on Twitter.
