... when it comes time to analyze customer data. There's a real-time deluge of customer information inside companies today, but it's difficult to make instant decisions about what the data means. William Hobbib, vice president of marketing at Lexington, Mass.-based StreamBase Systems Inc., thinks that will change with the release this week of his company's StreamBase 3.0 software. He says an updated StreamBase Optimizer module runs queries on real-time information three times faster than the previous release did. CEO Barry Morris explains that StreamBase executes its real-time queries on "windows" of streaming data that are herded into relational tables in RAM. And given that StreamBase is a 64-bit app, it supports a lot of memory indeed. If a query needs historical information, StreamBase can yank it from a disk and put it into a data window. Pricing starts at US$95,000.

But not all analytical data can be neatly organized in relational tables. That's why Intelligent Results Inc. in Bellevue, Wash., next week plans to unveil Predigy, an analytics software tool that not only dissects structured data for business intelligence clues but also can be applied to unstructured information found in e-mails, Word files and other documents. CEO Kelly Pennock claims that because Predigy can sift through both kinds of data, it's "better at predicting customer behavior." Pricing starts at $50,000.

Don't write out your company's app ...

... requirements -- draw them. Well, sort of. Marc Brown, senior director of product marketing at Borland Inc., says the Cupertino, Calif.-based company's new Caliber DefineIT software lets tech-savvy business analysts "create graphical storyboards" - basically flow charts of their software specifications that "fully flesh out functional components." Brown says the tool's visual nature helps end users agree more quickly on how an application should work. Caliber DefineIT costs $2,000 and is due on May 5.

Open-source subverts the dominant ...