Past
We need not go into the details of how BI functions were being performed or are still being approached using DW-driven technology. If Business needed insights into key trends then they would follow this well beaten path:
– Setup a de-normalized DW or Data Mart
– ETL information from transactional data stores into DW
– Use reporting tools like Cognos to generate the required MIS reports.
Therefore, this was the tried and trusted method and was considered business as usual. Traditional BI is very batch-oriented in nature and not real-time. However, while real-time mechanisms may look very compelling in terms of their value proposition and ROI, it may not be feasible to implement these quickly as they are dependent on a services-based infrastructure.
BI Technology Trends: The Present
As the competitive landscape becomes more intense, the need for real-time business intelligence is almost De Rigueur in certain types of industries, in order to gain business agility and competitive advantage. With the advent of technologies such as BAM and CEP, it is possible to perform real-time and even future what if business analytics.
BAM and CEP fall under a new category called Event Driven Architecture (EDA). These tools permit BI in both synchronous and asynchronous modes.
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is associated mainly with Web Services. It is a dashboard driven toolset that is comprised of various design time components and a runtime component. It is used in conjunction with other runtime components of a typical SOA implementation, such as ESBs and BPEL engines.
CEP (Complex Event Processing) is