Latency in real time systems
All real time business intelligence systems have some latency, but the goal is to minimize the time from the business event happening to a corrective action or notification being initiated. Analyst Richard Hackathorn describes three types of latency:

Data latency; the time taken to collect and store the data

Analysis latency; the time taken to analyse the data and turn it into actionable information

Action latency; the time taken to react to the information and take action

Real time business intelligence technologies are designed to reduce all three latencies to as close to zero as possible. Traditional business intelligence and business activity monitoring by comparison only seek to reduce data latency and do not address analysis latency or action latency since both are governed by manual processes.

Some commentators have introduced the concept of right time business intelligence which proposes that information should be delivered just before it is required, and not necessarily in real time.

Real Time Business Intelligence Architectures

* Event based Real time Business Intelligence

Real time Business Intelligence systems are event driven, and use Event Stream Processing techniques to enable events to be analysed without being first transformed and stored in a database. These in- memory techniques have the advantage that high rates of events can be monitored, and since data does not have to be written into databases data latency can be reduced to milliseconds.

* Real time Data warehouse

An alternative approach to event driven architectures is to increase the refresh cycle of an existing data warehouse to update the data more frequently. These real time data warehouse systems can achieve near real time update of data, where the data latency typically is in the rage from minutes to hours out of date. The analysis of the data is still usually manual, so the total latency is significantly different from event driven architectural approaches.

* Real time Server-less Technology

The latest alternative innovation to "real time" event driven and/or "real time" data warehouse architectures is MSSO Technology (Multiple Source Simple Output) which does away with the need for the data warehouse and intermediary servers altogether since it is able to access live data directly from the source (even from multiple, disparate sources). Because live data is accessed directly by server-less means, it provides the potential for zero-latency, real time data in the truest sense.

* Process-aware Real time Business Intelligence

Also known as Operational intelligence, this allows entire processes (transactions, steps) to be monitored, metrics (latency, completion/failed ratios, etc.) to be viewed, compared with warehoused historic data, and trended - in real time. Advanced implementations allow threshold detection, alerting and providing feedback to the process execution systems themselves, thereby 'closing the loop'.

Application areas
Algorithmic trading
Fraud detection
Systems monitoring
Application performance monitoring
Customer Relationship Management
Demand sensing
Dynamic pricing and yield management
Data validation
Operational intelligence and risk management
Payments & cash monitoring
Data security monitoring
Supply chain optimization
RFID/sensor network data analysis
Call center optimization