Imagine you are walking along a jungle trail and you see a distant orange-black furry shape (kind of cuddly) heading your way. You infer it’s coming closer because it gets larger and that growling noise gets louder. Those large yellow toothy things look sharp and…and…well you’re gone!
On the other hand, imagine you’re walking down a jungle trail and you spot a tiger in the distance. Now you’ve got a chance to escape.
The difference between these two scenarios is the processing time taken to recognize a threat and then respond to it and I frequently use this analogy to illustrate the value of Complex Event Processing (CEP) and how CEP complements traditional Business Intelligence (BI).
The current state of BI art – data warehouses, analytical tools and reporting – is akin to the first scenario. Here you identify a threat or opportunity by analyzing facts from the world around you. This is a useful activity and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. The problem arises when you rely on BI techniques to drive a quick response.
As the figure above illustrates, the problem with BI is the lead time required to derive first a result and then a reaction. Many BI systems use a combination of batch ETL and data-marts to migrate transactional data into a data warehouse. Then most analytics tools are designed for periodic post-hoc analysis by a small cadre of specialists. This means that the lead time for recognizing a threat or opportunity can be on the order of days, weeks or even months.
We can however short circuit part of this BI cycle by taking advantage of CEP within the transactional data stream. We effectively decouple analysis from recognition and assign those functions to the most efficient component within the solution.
The new CEP+BI lifecycle is shown in the next figure. BI techniques are still used to classify and understand the opportunities or threats, but we don’t rely on BI to drive a reaction. Instead, opportunities and threats are parameterized into a set of rules which CEP can apply to transactional data in real time.
In other words, analytics tells you that tigers are dangerous, CEP allows allows you to spot the tiger before it eats you!.
