In The New Technology Elite, I cited a 2002 anecdote where Steve Jobs is supposed to have told Dan Wood, founder of Karelia Software, then a partner
“You know those handcars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That’s Karelia. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks.”
While the story is humorous, my point in the chapter was to show a decade later Apple had built one of the most vibrant ecosystems in its iOS store ever seen in the industry. And Karelia is still in business.
Vendor partnerships ebb and flow….
What to make of the blockbuster Oracle/Microsoft/Salesforce.com announcement? Clearly there are plenty of cloud implications. Oracle on Azure. More Oracle in the Salesforce infrastructure. More Fusion sales feet on street via Salesforce.
But the reactions seem over the top. “Larry is anointing Marc as successor” “Marc just threw his partners (like Workday) under the bus” “Dell (a Salesforce hardware vendor) is now even more dead” And others about IBM, HP, SAP and Amazon.
My reaction – hats off to Larry Ellison for getting the market into a tizzy. Again. No wonder Business Insider ranks him first in its list of 50 most powerful enterprise tech execs.
The good news here is customers have more cloud validation and cloud choices. And plenty of speculation to chuckle about.
Complex Event Processing
A picture is worth a thousand words, correct? So, how much does a video translate to - exponentially greater number of words....
With all the attention being given to Big Data, the realization is sinking in that we are creating snapshots - which is a great step forward, but that we really need streaming video for much better pattern recognition.
I interviewed Dr. John Bates, founder of Apama and ex Cambridge professor for my next book and he talked about the "video" - the technologies which are classified as Complex Event Processing
“CEP enables real-time analytics to be performed on streaming data to show, for example, impending trends; it also allows patterns to be correlated across events in diverse data streams that can represent occurrences the business needs to know about and/or proactively respond to.
Inputs to a CEP system can include sensor data (e.g. SCADA sensors on a oil pipeline), data feeds (stock, news etc.), application data (e.g. CRM, ERP, credit card transactions etc.), location data (GPS, RFID etc.) and any other kind of feed.
CEP can shut down fraud while it is happening, push a marketing offer to a customer while they are in the right place at the right time or detect and place an algorithmic trade in microseconds, before a competitor spots the opportunity.”
The financial services industry has been an early adopter of CEP for its trading algorithms. That has moved to detecting insider trading patterns – correlating business events like earnings announcements to stock trades as an example. Now they are are adapting it on the consumer side of financial services for fraud detection.
John had tons of CEP examples in other industries - many of which will show in the book.
It's complex stuff - as the acronym suggests (though John remarkably presents his thoughts in lucid business constructs) . Deciding which signals to focus on and the correlation across them is not a skillset you find in abundance. But as in so many areas, the Polymath who can master multiple streams usually does better the Monomath.
June 30, 2013 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)