Opinion: Real-time detection and message-based integration highlight SeeWhy's business intelligence debut.As observed in the stories of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes,
theres more than one kind of intelligence. In an 1893 story by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, "The
Adventure of the Greek Interpreter," readers learn that Holmes
admires his older brother Mycroft for having superior powers of
observation and deduction—while at the same time saying that Mycroft
is "incapable" of applying those powers to the craft of detective work.
"If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an
armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever
lived. But he has no ambition and no energy," Sherlock tells his
colleague Dr. Watson. "He will not even go out of his way to verify his
own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the
trouble to prove himself right." I found myself thinking of the paradox
of an intelligence that lacks the practical faculties of application
after speaking last week with Charles Nicholls, founder and CEO of SeeWhy Software.
SeeWhy announces this week the general release of its Enterprise Edition
business intelligence product, following an extended period of testing
with early adopter sites. As Nicholls told me during our conversation,
"We want to change the way that people analyze data. Theres no reason
today why people should analyze data thats out of date, but its
incredibly difficult to make the data warehouse anything else."
SeeWhys approach, he said, begins with a real-time event-driven engine
for recognizing and analyzing significant data blips, then couples it
into a message-oriented environment that lets developers apply the
results close to the point where they can have the greatest leverage.
Nicholls contrasted this approach with what he characterized—and
I agree—as a more common business intelligence tactic of gathering
data during a process, analyzing it after the fact and alerting
someone if that post facto
analysis raises any red flags. Instead, Nicholls suggested, an
application should be able to invoke the analysis of data in flight
against a metrics suite while theres still time to identify likely
errors—or to follow up interactively with a user to get the details
of whats clearly an exceptional situation.
"If I automate a dumb process, I have an automated dumb process.
What I want to do is build business intelligence into the business
process," Nicholls said. He compared classical business intelligence
software models with the black-box flight recorder extracted from the
wreckage of a crashed airplane: What hed rather see is business
intelligence technology that functions more like an autopilot that
keeps you out of trouble in the first place.
SeeWhy is certainly not the first BI supplier to tell me about the
leverage thats waiting to be exploited in real-time data streams. Composite Software, Cognos and Informatica have all
earned eWEEK
Excellence recognition for their work in bringing analytic
capabilities out of the armchair of the enterprise data center to apply
them closer to the front lines of operational decision making. I
recently spoke with Scott Burk, statistics wizard in residence at
closeout retailer Overstock.com, about his use of KXEN
Analytic Framework to accomplish that same goal. SeeWhy isnt alone
in seeing the "why" to do this—but its a new entrant designed "from
the DNA up," as Nicholls put it during our interview, to do it well.
Tell me what you need done well at peter_coffee@ziffdavis.com.
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