Analytics need for speed can cause you to crash and burn

If you’ve missed it, analytics have been undergoing a shift for the last several years. Where before data was collated, cataloged and mined today it’s reacted upon in some sectors in real-time and in-stream. Technology is allowing us to harness big data and understand it in milliseconds but will this quest for speed be your ultimate undoing ?

Take Complex Event Processing. The goal of CEP is to identify meaningful events (such as opportunities or threats) and respond to them as quickly as possible. Large software companies such as TIBCO and Software AG are making a big play in this space right now with acquisitions aplomb and Software AG’s own Ivo Totev states that “CEP is an important capability helping customers detect important events and information that are critical to fast and accurate business decisions.”

Both TIBCO and Software AG now join the ranks of SAP and Oracle with similar offerings and their new acquisitions compliment their real-time monitoring and analytics capabilities.

But for every silver lining there is a cloud

Real-time monitoring, predictive analytics and complex event processing require streams of data and algorithms to look for patterns and correlations. Right now the world of FX and trading perhaps has the most sophisticated and fastest software in order to deal with this. It makes perfect sense to go after players in this space as acquisitions and offer customers a suite of solutions that mean their businesses can respond faster to events taking place.

But speed isn’t everything

At 1:07 p.m. on April 23rd, the AP Twitter account was hacked and wrongly reported that there had been two explosions at the White House and Obama had been injured. Seconds later, major US stock indexes started to crash. They were down 1 percent by the time the tweet was publicly identified as a result of a phishing attack three minutes later. In the quest for speed, trading algorithms have been designed to respond to events faster than anything thought possible before and these solutions are now entering the real business world and will power analytics and decision making.

“CEP is an important capability helping customers detect important events and information that are critical to fast and accurate business decisions.”

Accurate. Business. Decisions.

Automation and reacting at the speed of thought through event processing brought about the stock fall in April. While the market recovered quickly, entrusting critical business decisions in your organization on analytics of the type offered by real-time and CEP has to be approached with caution, a business does not recover from a wrong turn like the stock market.

It’s an extreme case cited above yet these are extremely competitive times and they require extremely sophisticated measures to stay ahead.

The quest for speed can either take you in front of the competition or into a brick wall faster than before.