Market forces, customer requirements, statutory mandates, and technology fuel organizations' endless drive to improve their operations. The emerging reality is that equilibrium just isn't possible - a steady state no longer exists. As a result, forward-looking organizations are transforming themselves into agile enterprises, capable of constant change, not just periodic realignment. In this distributed, collaborative, and intensely competitive business environment, the goal is to become intelligent enterprises, able to forecast with accuracy, execute with confidence and adjust at the speed of business.

This is the imperative for real-time analytics, the ability to use all of the resources at your disposal, including data, to improve your operations and quality of service, at the moment they're needed. If, at the moment (or soon after) information is created or modified in an operational system, it is sensed and acted upon by an analytical process, real-time analytics have occurred. Analytics is moving to center stage. Real-time analytics complement real-time operational systems. There's no time for static reports of month-old data, endless meetings, or retyping data into spreadsheets. Agile organizations must measure, evaluate, and react to events with a closed-loop of telemetry-like information, rules, decisions, and triggers -- all in real time.

In this white paper, Neil Raden of Hired Brains, Inc., describes real-time data, differences between active data warehouses and real-time data warehouses, and helps you decide if real-time analytics is for you. He also provides some examples and case studies.