cannot be made truly agile without the use of real-time analytics. Traditional BI just will not suffice.
So let us consider the following example:
Acme Mart is a medium-sized discount store with brick and mortar stores throughout the country.
It also sells merchandise through its high traffic website acmediscountstore.com.
The transaction volumes both at the stores and online is quite large—to the extent of several million per day.
It has a mature, established SOA infrastructure and its entire order management process is service-enabled.
Acme Mart also uses BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) to monitor services. Custom dashboards have been built to monitor sales of specific item categories and even items through sophisticated dashboards.
Contrast this with a similar business that uses Traditional BI mechanisms. It is obvious that it will not be able to match the level of agility of Acme Mart. By the time the sales data is analyzed, the opportunity to respond proactively has passed. Acme Mart is clearly more capable of reducing costs and increasing revenues via its real-time BAM-enabled BI solutions.
While CEP (Complex Event Processing) is similar to BAM, it is more of a services agnostic technology. It is sort of a real-time message aggregator that can process messages from various different sources including web services. One example of this can be applied to the current use case, along with order information, if related stock price information for the companies that produce those products are also needed in a separate dashboard then this feed that would normally come from the likes of a Bloomberg or Reuters can be combined with this Order data and displayed.
BI Technology Trends: The