New! Event-Driven Business Intelligence – July 17, 2008

Today, enterprise systems and applications generate a huge number of events: from software applications (SAP, PeopleSoft, etc.), devices (assembly lines, RFID chips, network monitoring…), information streams (stock tickers, exchange rates…), business processes (project approvals…), and interactions between people (emails, instant messages…).

In order to make timely, insightful business decisions, users need KPIs pushed to them when a specific business event happens in the "enterprise event cloud". The event needs to be correlated with the business history to equip these users with a consolidated view of their business.

The Event-Driven Business Intelligence prototype lets you extract competitive advantage from this “enterprise event cloud”. Based on an event-driven architecture, it enables you build a dashboard that tracks events as they happen in order to minimize data latency: the delay between when the event happens and your business users are notified.

There are three main types of applications where low data latency provides a clear competitive advantage:

Applications in which time represents revenue, such as with dynamic pricing optimization and yield management, financial market trading, supply chain inventory optimization, and direct marketing campaigns
Applications in which monitoring is key to improving business process such as in RFID data analysis, traffic control, operation risk management, payments monitoring, and direct marketing campaigns
Applications in which a service level agreement (SLA) is a core element of the business, such as customer relationship management or call center optimization

Demo

What are the benefits of using Event-Driven Business Intelligence?

The Event-Driven BI prototype lets you:

Visualize KPIs based on event streams, e.g.

Enterprise Application Events
Enterprise Service Bus for example via JMS
Click streams from Web Sites
Device events such as RFID

Complement and enhance event information with business intelligence using BusinessObjects Universe data
Leverage User Row Level Security
Query your enterprise event cloud using the BusinessObjects semantic layer
Extend BusinessObjects XI 3.0 ( XCelsius 2008, InfoView, BI Widgets) to real-time sources
Discover complex patterns in streams of event data (out-of order events, changes to event arrival rates, absence of events, etc.)

Above screenshot shows a sample Xcelsius dashboard leveraging Event-Driven Business Intelligence connectivity.

Includes evaluation license of EsperTech‘s Esper software in binary form. Esper is a copyrighted EsperTech Inc. product which is included solely for time limited evaluation purpose. Use of any Esper API is not a licensed use. Copyright © 2008, EsperTech Inc.. All rights reserved. http://www.espertech.com

Event-Driven Business Intelligence architecture

Event-Driven Business Intelligence is end to end based on Event-Driven Architecture: when an event enters in the server it is pushed up to the dashboard. On the top of that, server-client communication relies on SOA in order to fully adapts to your company network infrastructure.

Event-Driven Business Intelligence is based on several components:

A pack of configurable input connectors that can push data to the back end
A Designer to create new Event-Driven semantic layer – it could be a combination of several Event-Driven sources and BusinessObjects Universe
A back-end component that runs continuous queries created with business objects and a query panel
A Web Application that allows pushing events to the dashboards in HTTP and XML
A new XCelsius 2008 connection allows pushing event from the server to the dashboards

Event-Driven high level architecture

How does it work?

First, you need to define an Event Semantic Layer using the Event-Driven Business Intelligence Designer. To do that, you will have to map Event Stream to an Entity Relationship model and build from this the business objects.

In order to ease the creation of the Event-Driven query, business user can use a query panel leveraging the business objects defined in the Event Semantic Layer.

Integration of the Event-Driven query in Xcelsius is simple: bind the query to the Xcelsius model and select your dashboard visualisations.

And this is it, you have a secured Event-Driven dashboard with interaction on the KPI.

Enjoy! We hope you’ll use this prototype to discover how Event-Driven Business Intelligence change the way events can drive your business. Please give us feedback to make sure we know how you're using this and things you would like to see it do in the future. And remember, this is a prototype only and NOT for use in production environments.