Traditional Business Intelligence has traditionally dealt with only past transactions and insights are drawn from a historical record, be they financial, sales related or people related.
However, there is another kind of intelligence that is quite often ignored but is much more valuable - Event Intelligence!
The value of the information is in its timeliness. It is not worth much beyond a certain amount of time.
Stock Prices are a classic example. Buy or Sell orders depend upon sub-second observations of the share price and orders may have to be kicked off just at the nick of time.
Repeated suspicious failures to log into an online Banking site need to be observed, recorded and watches prepared instantly and people notified.
Telecom companies watch the patterns of transactions that their customers do to predict Churn or turnover of customers. This may not be that real-time but still event based. Certain kinds of events help telecom companies predict what will happen with a customer in a sequence of actions seen before many times.
Events trigger major processes within a company - low stock point being hit may trigger a production order. Low stock of items on the supermarket shelf triggers a restocking order at Walmart!
Traditional Business Intelligence products do not provide explicit features for handling Event Intelligence as yet. Many customers are making do with using existing features and buying real-time intelligence products off-the-shelf.
It is unfortunate that Database technology is almost 25 years old and new innovations and models are not making it to the real world. The news that SAP is buying Sybase will only set back any new innovations in the Database world for years to come.
Event Intelligence is too important to ignore, especially when it has the capability of adding a lot of useful ways to preventing things like Terrorism.
Hope someone gets on the ball and starts the Event Intelligence call rolling!
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order: the continuous thread of revelation. - Eudora Welty
Nari - you should check out the field of Complex Event Processing, which has been associated with event-based analytics for a number of years now!
Not that CEP has anything in particular to do with databases, mind you...
Cheers