Two events last month showed indicators of a convergence between the analytics world and CEP world.
Firstly Louis Bajuk-Yorgan from TIBCO Spotfire attended the Predictive Analytics World conference in San Francisco. He reported that:
Three key themes showed up multiple times throughout the talks-the growing importance of text mining, the application of net lift modeling to determine the real results of a marketing campaign (ignoring those people who would have bought anyway), and (most interesting to me) the importance of operationalizing predictive analytics.
In his opening keynote speech, Eric Siegel (the conference chair) saw the most important innovation in the field of Predictive Analytics focused on applying predictive analytics to operational decisions (as opposed to more established application areas such as customer churn & product recommendations). In a later talk, James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions (and co-author of the great book “Smart (Enough) Systems”), echoed Eric’s emphasis on operational results, encapsulated in the phrase “Action support, not just decision support.” James advised building an analytic platform that focused on the end game: the need to operationalize analytic decisions.
This is great validation for us, since operationalizing analytics is at the heart of TIBCO’s vision for its combined platform with Spotfire and S+ (as shown in products like Operations Analytics).
Then a week later Andreas Gerst from the TIBCO BusinessEvents team presented at cepconf in Munich, Germany. Andreas presented on CEP and Data Mining, and in particular how both these complement each other for advanced operational intelligence around customer management. Andreas used TIBCO BusinessEvents and TIBCO Spotfire Miner as his example technologies, mentioning techniques like PMML for moving from analytics to real-time event processing technologies.
