In today’s ultra-connected environments, conditions change frequently: sentiment changes due to a tweet, changes in weather, changes in buying behavior, and industrial equipment suddenly breaks. These changes are like the changes we all experience as humans in the world, and we rely on our nervous system to sense and respond to them. Kafka is like the technology equivalent of your body’s senses; new advancements in analytics technology helps turn that input into an enterprise nervous system that can sense and respond to these frequent changes – a new necessity to compete in today’s market.
The problem is, most companies don’t use their Kafka nervous system: events are transmitted, but nobody listens, and therefore nobody acts. Most companies simply ignore millions of data points because they don’t have a way for humans to analyze them all. Important information goes unnoticed: like sales leads, transactions, social media updates, customer calls, etc. Important changes in this volatile world that could help tell you if what you are doing in your business is working or not.
Now, you can listen and use that nervous system and all the data that comes with it. It’s easy to activate that nervous system, and use Kafka events to spot trends like identifying fraud or other critical trends for your business. What’s more, using Kafka has been mostly a developer-led affair up until this point. Kafka programming toolkits require heavy coding.
But now, thanks to TIBCO, any business user can quickly and easily tap into that real-time data transmitted on Kafka and create their own visualizations to spot trends. Using an easy graphical interface, these connections can be set up in minutes. Like the revolution of self-service business intelligence (BI) a decade ago, new streaming BI technology used with Kafka promises a new era of insight into real-time Kafka data.
TIBCO processes data streams from the topics you choose from Kafka and presents them in a graphical form that a line of business user can understand. And, as the world changes, the graphs you choose automatically update as more data streams in. These digital sensory inputs from real-time Kafka events can be used to continuously score data science models and update predictions. That means you can see and act in real time on important changes in your customer base, in your organization, and in your systems.
Real-world applications
Given the widespread adoption of Kafka, there are an immense number of new, innovative use cases that operational analytics with Kafka can apply to. For instance:
- Bank risk officers can continually check for anomalies within trades, orders, market data, client activity, account activity and look for profitable trading opportunities and potential compliance violations.
- Smart City analysts can monitor Kafka data from GPS, traffic sensors, buses and trains to help predict and react to dangerous conditions before they grow into a problem.
- Energy companies can analyze sensor data from their equipment to spot and prevent production issues before they happen.
To learn more, read this whitepaper “The New Era of Kafka Enterprise Analytics” about how streaming business intelligence, streaming analytics, and streaming data science can turn how you think about Kafka upside down.
