NASA issued the next in its series of grand challenges, this time the ultimate killer (or saver) application for the idea of proactive systems - the challenge consists of the sense part -- sensing all moving objects in space, forecast part --- forecast the asteroid trajectories, determine if the trajectory might jeopardize earth, and if yes -- use robotic vehicles to alter the trajectory. An ambitious project, which may be vital for the survival of earth. This includes breakthroughs in sensors and actuators and also lightweight robots that can explore asteroids. Note that there are 8800 known near earth asteroids. See also the Wikipedia value about "Asteroid impact avoidance". The relevant research community will have a lot of resources to work on these issues.
Doug Henschen, the editor of Information Week wrote a commentary entitled "big data reboots real-time analysis" . Henschen says that event processing was in the height of its hype in 2008, but the economic crisis stopped the growth of this area. He sees indications of "reboot" in the recent acquisitions of Apama by Software AG and Streambase by TIBCO, and attributes the reboot to the need of big data to evolve from its batch origins to detect patterns on moving data.
As I have written before, the barriers to growth stem from some external factors (certainly the general financial situation), but also the over-hype of request-response or batch oriented analytics (see my post on Sethu Raman's keynote in DEBS 2012). Another reason, as observed by Roy Schulte last year, is that many enterprises developed in-house solutions. I assume that Henschen is right in the sense that big data gives additional opportunities to event processing technology, and that the recent acquisitions will create waves of interest in the market. As I have written before, the next frontier is not improving the technology, but making it accessible to the business users and convert the enterprises to think in an event-driven way. Jeff Adkins and myself will discuss this issue in the coming DEBS'13 tutorial, on June 30. More - later.
More from the event processing vendors Blogs. This time from SAP. Its ESP product. SAP event processing Blog notifies on a new feature in the product that enables a derived event to trigger WSDL that prompts the user for requesting a predefined web service. In the EPN terminology, this WSDL is an event consumer. There are also other products that cross the borders and provide actions as part of the event processing product. As integration with adjacent systems is a major issue, there are already several solutions which extends event processing to the consumer side, with built-in actions. It is also useful to extend to the producer side -- the instrumentation process. I'll write about the producer side in another post.
