I ran into yet another entrant into the Streaming (ESP) market last week. The company was founded by Charles Nicholls, who used to be an executive of Business Objects. For me, SeeWhy is an interesting company. While the high profile ESP companies (StreamBase and Apama) have gone after the attractive (and perhaps lucrative) bank trading applications, SeeWhy is unashamedly about BI. That’s the reason for the name of the company, I guess.

Personally I like the fact that SeeWhy’s proposition isn’t about who can scale to the largest number of transactions. It’s about answering the question “what is real-time BI?”. As regards how fast you can process multiple streams of events, the most crucial technical requirement is that you have an in-memory architecture that doesn’t introduce any latency in its management of streams and which performs in-flight calculations. You need parallelism and you need some close-to-the-iron software engineering. Once you have that, the performance distinctions are probably not too important for the majority of ESP applications. (Did you ever hear of a company dominating its field because it chose the best performing relational database?)

So SeeWhy appeals to me because it doesn’t go into a big song and dance about the velocity of the architecture. Instead it goes into a song and dance about real-time BI. I had an engaging interchange with Charles about this. What SeeWhy does is provide real-time graphical representation of cycles in business events. The events themselves can be anything; the movement off the shelves of supermarket goods, the delivery of shipments, the number of mobile phone calls being made and so on. All such events tend to pulse in a cyclical way. There are daily cycles, weekly cycles, monthly cycles and annual cycles—and others probably.

What SeeWhy does is set a baseline (using historical records) and report on any variations from the norm. It can do this at an atomic level (such as a specific supermarket shelf in a specific location) or an aggregated level (several supermarkets in a given area). It can also be programmed to generate alerts (to email, SMS or whatever) when a variation goes beyond a specific threshold and you can have the trend graphs on a screen and drill down if the mood takes you.

If you haven’t realised, this is very different to the reports and dashboards of traditional BI from Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle et al. I’m thinking that’s it’s the beginning of real-time BI.