A few operational BI/BPM/business rules stories
Intersystems is rolling out DeepSee, which is a Cache’-specific BI engine. Since some Intersystems OEMs have been known to pay more money to Business Objects/Crystal Reports than to Intersystems itself, the business motivation is obvious. Technically, Intersystems’ claims include:
- Intersystems integrated true bitmapped indexes into Cache’ 4-5 years ago, and hence can do fast queries.
- In particular, the queries are fast enough for operational BI.
- The whole thing, even in Release 1, has a decent feature set.
So far, this is basically Intersystems playing catchup in an area where RDBMS vendors are naturally strong, and hence my eyes glaze over a bit.
But a couple of the app stories associated with this announcement sound like real operational BI, and those are always cool. One is from a VAR called Quadramed, which uses a dashboard to figure out how well business rules are using, allowing end users to change the rules on the fly accordingly. (At that point in the briefing I suggested they reach out to business rules — excuse me, “decision management” — enthusiast James Taylor, who might like that story. 🙂 ) Another story involved Business Process Management (BPM) for an integrated set of medical laboratory tests.
I tripped across another cool-sounding story yesterday, in a pretty specialized area — Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management, which evidently relies pretty heavily on a business rules engine too. (I think the business rules are there mainly to estimate your usage, because we all know that just billing based on what the meter says would be way too simple … .)
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Thanks for the shout out! The utility metering software will almost certainly allow business rules for billing where the prices vary by usage or by customer type. For instance, defining different billing rules for elderly or disabled customers or defining windows during which power is cheaper or more expensive. This kind of rules-based billing is essential as companies move to smart meters.
JT