I just noticed David Luckham had mentioned that Popular Mechanics defined CEP as one of “10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know in 2011”. Clearly I had missed reading that in my copy of Pop Mechanics (I’m usually more interested in the flying car reports etc).
Corporations and governments routinely comb through enormous databases of information and images (such as those pulled from surveillance cameras) in search of patterns. But in today’s data-rich world, an unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio can make it time-consuming and expensive to find anything relevant. A new generation of software is shifting the focus from “data” (a record of what’s happened) to “events” (what’s happening right now). Companies like StreamBase Systems and Tibco offer complex-event processing systems that analyze enormous flows of data in real time using new database and pattern-recognition approaches. This allows them to make instant decisions about whether to make a stock trade, initiate surveillance on a potential terrorist or halt a suspicious credit-card transaction…
