This weekend there was an article in a Sunday newspaper for an “intelligent smoke detector” – one that not just sets off an audible alarm, but also sends a message to some registered phones. And last week the BBC reported on a CISCO prediction on the “proliferation of … connected appliances and other smart machines”, and 15Bn internet-connected devices passing 966 exabytes of internet-traffic by 2015.
These predictions are significant: although many of us use multi-connected devices (phone, PC, etc), many of the increase in connectivity will be for machine to machine (M2M) devices, capturing events and passing them on to be aggregated and have business rules and policies applied to context-rich information in real-time (think things like smart grid energy usage, as well as domestic smoke detectors and their ilk).
From the CEP perspective, complex event processing is needed to actually monitor, digest and control all this new data (as events or event streams) and devices. And I’ve heard that one large computer networking company will be presenting on their use of CEP at the TIBCO user group (TUCON) later this year…
