Intelligent Enterprise

Realtime Revelations

Intelligent analysis migrates from finance to e-commerce

Whether the economy is moving faster than the speed limit or coming in for a soft landing, businesses always have optimal paths to take and obstacles that block those paths. For as long as data has been collected, businesses have searched for ways to derive the most strategically advantageous meaning from it. With the advent of commerce over the Internet, the vastly increased flow of data has provided an even greater opportunity to extract strategic information, but has also made the task much more complex. Black Pearl is one of a growing number of companies tackling the challenge to deliver realtime BI for enterprise data sets.

Many of the technological concepts Black Pearl uses in its Knowledge Broker product have been around a long time: intelligent agents, ontologies (data representation layers), rules-based decision-making, and giving business users more access to intelligence, for example. Even some of the newer concepts on which Knowledge Broker is based are recognized as important and are also implemented in several products from other vendors - concepts such as realtime personalization, customer relationship management, and XML functionality. What seems unique about Knowledge Broker is the way it combines existing technologies to address widely sought business goals.

To that point, Barry Grushkin, an Intelligent Enterprise Decision Support columnist, said, "Each of the parts being used by Black Pearl, though comparatively new, is far from unique. What is interesting, however, is their integration of the parts - agent-based information gathering, statistics-based business rules generation, neural net optimization and rule generation, and an ontology to simplify rule construction - into a single package for use in CRM applications."

Knowledge Broker uses XML and JDBC to help cull information from multiple sources. And it uses a modifiable ontology to improve its comprehension of relationships between concepts, rules, and data. Business-level users can edit the ontology and rules, as well as receive suggestions from the engine about what actions to take.

So far, Black Pearl has focused on the financial industry and CRM applications, with pilot programs at Merrill Lynch, PaineWebber, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Lucent Technologies. The company's co-founder, CEO, and CTO Lisa Hammitt, formerly of Oracle, Gupta Technologies (now called Centura Software Corp.), and Sybase, sees four major areas as Black Pearl's natural domain: financial services, telecommunications services, logistics, and healthcare. Sybase added Black Pearl to its E-Portal alliance program in July 2000.

Angela Kennedy, president and CEO of Wisdom Technologies Corp. in Pittsburgh, provider of artificial intelligence (AI) and optimization software for corporate investment and debt portfolio management, believes there are four main reasons that more products may be emerging that intelligently process large data sets in real time:

• The maturation of AI technologies, such as the development of better algorithms for intelligent agents
• The increasing availability of the high-speed, high-density hardware needed to run these types of applications
• The stress of increasing information overload exacerbating problems that can only be solved with context-sensitive, intelligent software
• Money flowing toward development of this technology (chiefly because information overload is such a serious business problem, but also boosted by the last few years' technology investment boom).

Grushkin, without the benefit of close inspection of the product, believes Knowledge Broker's ilk will become more pervasive. "More often than not, companies in the financial industry are the first commercial adapters of high-end technological approaches, with other industries following. I certainly see this kind of CRM being increasingly applied in e-commerce very soon," said Grushkin.

In addition to Black Pearl, other high-profile companies have leaped into the realtime BI market. In 2000, SPSS released its CustomerCentric product, which applies business rules and data mining in real time to customers of e-commerce sites, for personalization and recommendation.

Computer Associates also released its Intelligent CRM suite in 2000, which benefits from CA's Neugents, intelligent agents that Yogesh Gupta, CA's CTO, says the company continues to aggressively develop. The company received two more Neugent-related patents in December 2000, for algorithms that increase Neugents' scalability and advanced pattern-matching capabilities. Gupta said that, like Black Pearl, CA has found that creating domain-specific applications of widely applicable intelligence technology helps boost interest and sales in the e-commerce realm.