The New Decade of Advanced Analytics: Roll Over Rocket Scientists!

by James Kobielus, Forrrester Research

Crafting a truly comprehensive analytics environment is a bit like staring deeply into the night sky. When you try to absorb the billions of celestial objects out there—all of them at different ages and stages in their respective life cycles–you risk driving yourself insane. Your complex field of view contains the deep past, present, and future in one glorious, glowing glimpse.

Increasingly, the complex event processing (CEP) market, as a segment of the analytics arena, suffers from this “all too much” problem. This is not a slap against the technology itself, which is mature, or the growing list of CEP vendors, who offer many sophisticated solutions. Indeed, many CEP vendors now offer tools for viewing the deep present, consisting of myriad streams of real-time events, and the deep past, in the form of access to historical information pulled from many data warehouses, marts, and other repositories. And some—most notably, IBM with its InfoSphere Streams technology–now support visualization of the deep future, through its ability to apply predictive models to real-time event streams.

The core problem with today’s CEP offerings is that many of them are power tools, not solutions suitable for the mass business market. Read on