Building Real-Time Analytics Applications

Chapter 1. Building Real-Time Analytics Applications

This report will introduce you to the real-time analytics applications that organizations are building to power new operational workflows. You’ll learn about the purposes of these applications, the value they provide, and the technologies needed to create them.

Once you’ve completed this report, you’ll know how real-time analytics applications can help your organization, and you’ll know what you’ll need to create a solution that works for you.

What Is a Real-Time Analytics Application?

Every organization needs insight to succeed and excel. While insights can come from many wellsprings, the foundation for insights is data: both internal data from operational systems and external data from partners, vendors, and public sources.

For decades, the traditional approach to analytics has focused on data warehousing and business intelligence, where experts query historical data “once in a while” for executive dashboards and reports.

Meanwhile, transactional applications have been the lifeblood of business operations, storing data that enables sales, marketing, manufacturing, shipping, payroll, supply chain, customer service, financial reporting, and many other functions to operate.

Leading organizations like Netflix, Target, Salesforce, and Wikimedia Foundation¹ have recognized the opportunity and value of bringing together analytics and applications in a new way. Instead of infrequent analytics queries on historical data, their developers ...