Internet of Things - what's holding us back?

InformationWeek published an article this week by Chris Murphy entitled: "Internet Of Things: What's Holding Us Back".   In this article Murphy describes several reasons that hold us back from exploiting the potential of the IoT.  The reasons he mentions are:

1. The data is not good enough:  the claim is that the conception that all requested data is readily available is not consistent with reality, where data suffers from quality,  frequency and spatial coverage of the sensors, and data integration issues.
2. Networks aren't ubiquitous:   The product owners don't have control over the availability of networks
3. Integration is tougher than analysis:  The main problem is not to analyze the data, but to integrate all data needed for analysis
4. More sensor innovation needed: The stated areas of required innovation are - combine video sources which today are under-utilized; more-refined and more-affordable environmental sensors; software-defined sensor,a combination of multiple sensors plus computing power that sits out on a network and "calculates rather than measures."
5. Status quo security doesn't cut it.  Security systems for IoT should be radically different than those developed for traditional IP.

I agree that all of these contribute in one way or another to the difficulties around exploiting the potential of IoT.    Dealing with inexact or uncertain data is a major issue, a link to our tutorial on the topic can be obtained from this blog post.  What Murphy refers as "software defined sensor", is in fact, the ability to use multiple sensors and get sense out of it in real-time,  this is exactly what the event processing discipline produces, furthermore, our work on event modeling contributes to make it simpler. 

I am planned to deliver a tutorial on "Internet of Everything" in DEBS 2014 in Mumbai, where I'll discuss all these issues.  

More - later. 

Event processing platforms - reboot?

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.