The idea of real-time business intelligence has been around for a while (see the Wikipedia page on the topic begun in 2006). But while people have been talking about the idea for years, I haven't seen many enterprises actually embrace the vision, much less realize the benefits it enables.
At least part of the reason has been the lack of tooling for implementing BI and analytics in real time. Traditional data-warehousing environments were heavily oriented toward batch operations with extremely high latencies, were incredibly expensive, or both.
A number of powerful, easy-to-use open source platforms have emerged to change this. Two of the most notable ones are Apache Storm and Apache Spark, which offer real-time processing capabilities to a much wider range of potential users. Both are projects within the Apache Software Foundation, and while the two tools provide overlapping capabilities, they each have distinctive features and roles to play.
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