During a recent flight from Boston to L.A., Paris Hilton was standing next to me as we all made our way to our seats. I saw her -- big glasses, platinum blonde hair, wispy frame -- but didn't make the connection until someone pointed it out later. So it may come as no surprise that I asked Coral8 whether numbers one through seven had been taken. They responded that it was just as it sounds, Coral8, as in "correlate, you idiot." Apt for a company that does complex event processing, the rarified air of correlating transaction data in motion.

Paris Hilton; complex event processing. Hey, sometimes correlation is in the eye of the beholder.

This is more than the rarified air of a cross-country flight, though. This is the juicy stuff, and I don’t mean the tabloid kind, but real-time data analytics, sucking in huge data sets quickly and providing some sort of meaning that drives business right now! Wall Street financial data patterns, where we're talking about 150,000 ticks per second, representing buy and sell signals, portending risk, triggering the ballyhooed algorithmic trading of the day.

Click-stream analysis so that you don't get those pop up ring tone offers and invitations to adult-only sites (unless, of course, you’re into that kind of thing), but relevant offers based on your behavioral patterns, your intentions. Analyzing why people respond to one thing and not another and adjusting on the fly.

And as RFID tags make their way into virtually every product in every warehouse, there will be plenty of logistics and transaction data to process there, too.

Coral8 got its start a few years ago, but the complex event processing field is really just emerging and struggling to find its voice. As with any promising market, there are plenty of competitors from all walks, including other small startups like StreamBase and established players like Progress and the big boys like IBM, Oracle, and Tibco.

CEO Terry Cunningham claims that Coral8’s pure-play approach is well suited to this market and that his company’s products and language are very advanced; you can actually download and develop for free and he says plenty of people are doing that and coming to them with finished product, ready to make a purchase. Sallie Mae is a notable customer -- it developed an application to examine click-stream behavior on loan abandonment.

Coral8 just has to focus on SQL and builds adapters for various service bus architectures and disparate data sources. The product is licensed at $15,000 per core. There's also a front-end portal that comes in at $500 per seat. And while it may not be as glamorous as the Harvard University Woman of the Year Award, Coral8 was named a company to watch by Intelligent Enterprise for 2008.