Last week TIBCO Software announced a pretty good set of Q2 financial results (e.g. “Our Business Optimization portfolio grew by more than 65% over last year, with fairly spectacular growth coming from both Spotfire and BusinessEvents” and “we saw tremendous growth in a number of these verticals, …Transportation and Logistics … retail … Insurance growing … and Energy growing …”). In the Transport case there was an interesting blog post byPaul Coby, an industry specialist, on the “game-changing trends that shape technology innovation in the airline business”.
So we have our first C trend: convergence. Voice and data … this means more channels and complexity for airlines and airports.
Multi-channel handling is of course one of the use cases for CEP – taking event streams from multiple sources and treating them in the same way. On the other hand this also reminds me very much of the recent tibbr 3.0 announcement (social media for business, which in 3.0 includes voice and video handling).
My second C trend is the ubiquity of communications. Everything as well as everyone will soon be connected through IP addresses. So everything – aircraft, engines, components, cargo containers, even bags – will be “talking” and exchanging huge volumes of data… how you interpret your data, is going to need to become a lot more sophisticated. If you can get this right, you will be able to drive effective customer personalisation, the key to loyalty.
This covers M2M – everything being able to “dial-home”, as well as RFID etc. Handling these events are of course important for business operational control as well as optimisation like customer loyalty…
The next mega-trend is connectivity in a mobile world… location-based services will evolve to give passengers information relevant to their precise location at every step of their journey… [and] also provide great productivity and efficiency gains in ground operations and maintenance, as employees get the information they need much faster and manual tasks become automated.
This is really a consequence of the previous trend – communication leads to more connectivity. And of course location-based events are important in logistic information systems (e.g. the aforementioned baggage handling management requires events about location!).
My fourth mega-trend is the move of everything to the cloud…
Hopefully once its reliable!
