Tibco has updated its Live Data Mart software, an amalgam of its Spotfire data-visualization and Streambase event-processing products.
New features of the 2.0 version introduced on Tuesday include the ability to embed predictive analytics, to predict customer churn for instance, as well as support for the Internet of Things and in-memory data grid technology (called Tibco ActiveSpaces).
This software is designed to analyze any type of event, be it a transaction, a trade, or a news article, and make sense of it in real time. It falls in the category of "event stream processing;" other examples include IBM InfoSphere Streams and SAS Event Stream Processing.
This technology became popular in the mid-2000s on Wall Street as high-frequency trading emerged. It was used to analyze live trading, process news on the fly and to place quick, well-informed bets. For instance, a market data event such as a plunge in the price of certain stocks might trigger an algorithmic trading program to buy some of the shares. But if the price drop were caused by a calamity such as a terrorist attack, such a purchase would be unwise. Software that could simultaneously monitor market data and news feeds and find correlations could make useful recommendations.
Now that traditional banks are getting closer to processing transactions in real time, they also are starting to need this kind of capability, Tibco execs say.
"Businesses are becoming digital-aware and omnichannel in their marketing," said Richard Tibbetts, chief technology officer for event processing at Tibco. "In the case of retail banking, they're also trying to blur areas of their organizations and between the physical and digital world. And in doing so, they're looking at leveraging these 'big data' technologies."
Banks can use the software for event-driven marketing: it can monitor customers' behavior in real time to answer questions such as: is a campaign working? are people coming to the website? are people coming into the branch office? That information can be used to quickly revamp advertisements and email campaigns.
"The thing with visibility is you can change your tactics more quickly and you can also adjust your [spending] if it's not appropriate," Tibbetts said. "If you're not going to generate the conversion rates you predicted, knowing that after a day is important rather than having to wait a month."
It can also be used to help with anti-money-laundering, Tibbetts said, as well as in selecting payment gateways, making operational improvements, detecting fraud, managing risk and handling regulatory compliance.
"We talk a lot about real-time compliance," he said. "Any time you have information you might need to be generating end of day, end of month, end of quarter, those work with different data sets. You can get a continuous live view of what that number is and where your regulatory compliance issues might be. And the ability to tie that back to operational decisions can be used to resolve those issues."
Tibco's integration tools allow it to connect to many existing databases, including IBM DB2 and Sybase, Tibbetts said. It can also pull information from core banking systems, weblogs and mobile app traffic.
To date, Live Data Mart has been used by banks for tasks such as automatically deciding whether to give a customer a mortgage or personal loan based on their past activities with the bank, Tibbetts said.
"What we're doing with the Live Data Mart is making that same information visible to operational staff, people working directly with the customer in the call center or at a teller line, and showing live information about the most recent interaction with the customer and analytics what do we think will be the best way to resolve the customer's problem" while that customer is on the phone or in the branch, he said.
