More and more, business users don't want to wait for data filtering through transactional systems to be processed, collected and analyzed. The need for more immediate information has spawned a crop of start-ups with analytic tools that process data on the fly and alert executives to changing business conditions as they occur.

The latest is Coral8, which this week is expected to debut its first enterprise product, the Coral8 Complex Event Processing Engine.

Coral8's software analyzes information from systems, databases and applications in real time and looks for events that might signal a fraudulent transaction, for example, or a kink in the supply chain. It compares the current state of activities with expected conditions, then uses embedded business rules to determine how to respond to threats and opportunities.

The technology is similar to the event-processing technology used in network and systems management products, but with a business spin. Instead of looking for server bottlenecks or application delivery problems, Coral8 watches for business anomalies. It is designed to handle hundreds of thousands of messages per second. It processes content from sources such as real-time datastreams and message brokers; and it exports data to performance dashboards, business process management software and other analytic tools.

"Think of this as an inline processor that we strap onto the pipe of data flow before it gets to the database," says Coral8 CEO Terry Cunningham. "Instead of a database, where a query is run against the data, this is the opposite. The registered query is always present, and you run the data against the query." This engine continually looks for certain patterns, he says. It looks at real-time data and pulls historical reference data from a database for comparison.

Cunningham founded business intelligence pioneer Crystal Decisions in 1984 and held senior executive positions at Seagate Technology and Veritas Software. With Coral8, he's repeating the market strategy of pursuing OEM agreements with software makers with vertical expertise that don't want to develop a proprietary analytic engine. For example, storage-management software maker Intermine uses Coral8's technology to build real-time reports on storage resource usage and availability, and Patient Care Technology Systems uses it to help keep tabs on hospital resources tagged with RFID devices.