Einstein Enterprise - A Set of Tools for Building Intelligent Business Systems

The first fifty years of the information age revolved around business systems that were transactional in nature. The next fifty will be about building machines that can think and act as "intelligent advisors" or "virtual assistants" multiplying the intellectual capability of any workforce. The first foray into this field of "smart software" by organizations took place in the mid 1980's. At that time artificial intelligence garnered a great deal of press, especially expert systems that could diagnose medical conditions, approve credit card purchases, and configure complex computer systems. Although these systems were technically sound and provided economic value, initial successes did not lead to widespread adoption. This was due to system integration issues, the arcane nature of the programming languages that were used, and the basic fear from skilled workers that they might be replaced.

In the nineteen nineties, another approach to building smart systems emerged, that of using mathematical algorithms and data analytics, to help forecast business outcomes. Today these types of applications predict which customers will respond favorably to a given marketing promotion, are most likely to cancel their service, or file a fraudulent claim. Although current analytics applications play a vital and worthwhile role in today's enterprise, they are not capable of intelligent thought. They are limited by their inability to reason, logically deduce new facts from existing ones, match patterns found within their environment to past experience, and learn from their mistakes.

There is a significant "functional gap" left open by today's business intelligence (BI) software suites. A recent survey conducted by Information Week magazine found that only nineteen percent of companies using business intelligence software were very successful in improving performance. The core subsystems of these product suites provide an overwhelming amount of information to decision makers, either in the form of reports, dashboards, or through drilling down into "cubes of data", without ever explaining what it all means. This information is nothing more than a rear-view mirror perspective of historical business activity occurring within an enterprise. Some performance management applications attempt to identify key organizational metrics which are related to profitability, but fall short in their ability to know what the future has in store. Just as important, these applications can not recommend what course of action to take as business events occur in real-time. They lack the innate ability to optimize each individual outcome, as potentially thousands or even millions of transactions occur every minute. Companies, in these tough economic times need to be able to look clearly at the road ahead, through the front windshield rather than the rear-view mirror, and be able to take immediate action to seize an economic opportunity before it is gone, all it takes is one millisecond. This is the type of power that Einstein Enterprise will provide you with.

Over the past ten years there has also been an overwhelming trend in the software industry towards "professional" open source products, which provide the equivalent features and functionality of oftentimes very expensive commercial offerings. To draw a parallel to the pharmaceutical industry, open source software is like a less expensive generic drug that has now become available because a patent has expired. Why pay two million dollars for software licenses from five separate commercial vendors, when you can effectively have a fully supported "generic equivalent" from a single vendor, for a mere fraction of the cost? Mobile Agent Technologies has incorporated this basic fact into our business model. Our strategy combines our own proprietary software technologies with a number of open source initiatives. This compelling business model allows us to deliver a cohesive platform for building intelligent systems for about one tenth the cost of similar commercial products. Not to mention the fact that we can re-purpose unused CPU cycles and memory on dozens or even hundreds of existing desktop PCs throughout your organization, creating the processing power which is equivalent to a supercomputer, using a capital investment in computer hardware your firm has already made.

More Information