Realtime Data Analytical Solutions
Data analytics initiatives can help businesses increase revenues, improve operational efficiency, optimize marketing campaigns and customer service efforts, respond more quickly to emerging market trends and gain a competitive edge over rivals — all with the ultimate goal of boosting business performance. Depending on the particular application, the data that’s analyzed can consist of either historical records or new information that has been processed for Real-Time Analyticsuses. In addition, it can come from a mix of internal systems and external data sources.
Data analytics (DA) is the process of examining data sets in order to draw conclusions about the information they contain, increasingly with the aid of specialized systems and software. Data analytics technologies and techniques are widely used in commercial industries to enable organizations to make more-informed business decisions and by scientists and researchers to verify or disprove scientific models, theories and hypotheses.
As a term, data analytics predominantly refers to an assortment of applications, from basic Business Intelligence (BI), reporting and online analytical processing (OLAP) to various forms of advanced analytics. In that sense, it’s similar in nature to business analytics, another umbrella term for approaches to analyzing data — with the difference that the latter is oriented to business uses, while data analytics has a broader focus. The expansive view of the term isn’t universal, though: In some cases, people use data analytics specifically to mean advanced analytics, treating BI as a separate category.
Architectures
Event Based
Real-time Business Intelligence systems are event driven, and may use Complex Event Processing, Event Stream Processing and Mashup (web application hybrid) techniques to enable events to be analysed without being first transformed and stored in a database. These in-memory database techniques have the advantage that high rates of events can be monitored, and since data does not have to be written into databases data latency can be reduced to milliseconds.
Data Warehouse
An alternative approach to event driven architectures is to increase the refresh cycle of an existing data warehouse to update the data more frequently. These real-time data warehouse systems can achieve near real-time update of data, where the data latency typically is in the range from minutes to hours. The analysis of the data is still usually manual, so the total latency is significantly different from event driven architectural approaches.
Server-less Technology
The latest alternative innovation to “real-time” event driven and/or “real-time” data warehouse architectures is MSSO Technology (Multiple Source Simple Output) which removes the need for the data warehouse and intermediary servers altogether since it is able to access live data directly from the source (even from multiple, disparate sources). Because live data is accessed directly by server-less means, it provides the potential for zero-latency, real-time data in the truest sense.
Process Aware
This is sometimes considered a subset of operational intelligence and is also identified with Business Activity Monitoring. It allows entire processes (transactions, steps) to be monitored, metrics (latency, completion/failed ratios, etc.) to be viewed, compared with warehoused historic data, and trended in real-time. Advanced implementations allow threshold detection, alerting and providing feedback to the process execution systems themselves, thereby ‘closing the loop’.
Technologies that support Real-Time Analytics
Technologies that can be supported to enable real-time business intelligence are data visualization, data federation, enterprise information integration, enterprise application integration and service oriented architecture. Complex event processing tools can be used to analyze data streams in real time and either trigger automated actions or alert workers to patterns and trends.