SeeWhy: Real Time Business Intelligence without Search
July 6, 2008
SeeWhy came on my radar with its “no search” marketing angle. I poked around and was, at first, confused. The company appeared to occupy a no-man’s-land between search engine optimization and business intelligence that I avoid. A quick look revealed that the company has a business event system with some interesting twists.
Real Time and My Concern with the Phrase
“Real time” has been promoted from technical impossibility to buzz word. The general notion of “real time” among computer scientists is that simultaneity across linked systems is impossible outside of the bizarre world of high-energy physics. No matter how minute, latencies exists even if measured in picoseconds. But to a marketer, “real time” connotes a software, gentler world far from the “batch oriented” or human-intermediated world familiar to most professionals.
Now, real time is coming to the enterprise. Exegy, based in St. Louis, Missouri, offers an appliance that can ingest content by the megabyte per second and spit out processed content without much latency. To achieve this, Exegy has done some hardware engineering, but the gizmo works. When you shift to “real time” in the types of server environments found in a trucking company or a consulting company where capital investment is mostly out of the question, “real time” is not in Exegy’s league.
Let me be clear: to deliver near real time content processing Exegy style, you need specialized infrastructure. The average Dell server is not able to deliver no matter how insistent Bill Trucking Company’s information technology consultant becomes.
A number of text and content processing companies are asserting that their systems operate in “real time”. They don’t. Against this background, let’s look at one interesting company. I will not comment on this firm’s emphasis on real time processing, preferring to provide some basic information about this single firm and then offering, as a wrap up, a handful of generalized observations.
SeeWhy Software: Operational Business Intelligence
SeeWhy is one of the ?rst “open source” real time Business Intelligence platform for the event driven enterprise. SeeWhy continuously analyzes and interprets streams of individual business events, to alert you immediately to opportunities and risks and enable everyday decisions to be automated.
The marketing angle that snared my attention.
This company Incorporated in 2003 by BI industry veteran Charles Nicholls, SeeWhy is backed by several venture capital investors, including LogiSpring, Pentech Ventures, Delta Partners and handful of private folks. SeeWhy is headquartered in Windsor, United Kingdom.
The Charles Nicholls, founder and CEO, said here:
I began to ponder on the Business Intelligence industry with all its unfulfilled promise, often long on vision and short on delivery. The more that you challenge the status quo, the faster that you can see the opportunities to make the world a better place. It was this process that started me on a journey that led inevitably to create SeeWhy.
The basic premise of the company is summarized in this diagram from “In Search of Insight,” a 43 page document from Mr. Nicholls:
The Web 2.0 Angle
You can download a monograph “In Search of Insight” about the company’s approach to business intelligence here, no annoying registration, thank you, SeeWhy.
The Products
The company offers two flavors of its business intelligence. One is intended for search engine optimization, which interests me not. The other–business intelligence for organizations–merits my attention.
“Operational business intelligence”, according to the company:
differs from business process monitoring significantly, notably because it is designed to deliver business information from across multiple messaging systems, applications, protocols and BPM environments.
This strikes at the heart of transformation, aggregation, and normalization. These three issues can burn through an information technology budget pretty quickly. We will set aside the these nettles for plucking elsewhere.
The company says:
The SeeWhy system uses an adaptive approach to interpreting real-time data. What this means in practice is that the system automatically learns as the data changes, and automatically adapts the rules where appropriate to take account of changing behavior. This is a significant innovation compared with other approaches: traditional rules based approaches require the users to set the level of rules, and maintain them over time. The problem is in order to maintain the rules effectively, you need a very good understanding of the data, and how the business is changing at a microscopic level of detail. Consequently these rules generally do not get maintained adequately, and performance of the system gradually deteriorates over time.
To deliver, SeeWhy provides a system. A schematic of its principal components appears below:
SeeWhy System in Block Diagram Form
You can see the larger version of this diagram in SeeWhy Operational Business Intelligence Overview here on page 11. Note that this is a publicly accessible documents the contents of which is copyrighted. The system makes use of work flows, templates, smart tags, context information, and links for business events. The system captures the events and processes these data to output “intelligence” about what’s going on in an organization.
Sample SeeWhy Output
Observations
Scalable for the most SeeWhy’s approach strikes at the heart of the problems with traditional enterprise search with intelligence glued on like a dwarf on my mother’s paper bird houses which she makes. SeeWhy integrates into a deeper level than search vendors who index content. Note that SeeWhy, despite its open source angle, is competing with Agent Logic, Aleri, AptSoft (now absorbed into IBM-land), GemFire, RiverGlass, Syndera, Tibco, and Vhayu Technologies, among others, including search vendors.
What will be interesting to me is to see which search vendor integrates a SeeWhy type system with a more traditional search system. Anyone know of a company walking down this path?
Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2008
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