Sensory perception
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Combining complex event processing with sensors could make the 'Internet of things' a reality
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Even choosing the right system is likely to be a taxing process. Many of the smaller CEP specialists have been bought up by much larger companies (StreamBase Systems a notable exception) but the market remains “broadly distributed”, according to Jones of Gartner. Products are expensive too, she notes, with list prices currently ranging from $50,000 to $500,000. Although deal sizes appear to be falling “somewhat”, the top end of this price bracket can be hard to justify for many kinds of projects.
One organisation currently evaluating a CEP deployment is Royal Mail, which sees the technology as a way to track individual deliveries, and therefore to advise recipients of exactly when their parcels might arrive. Speaking to Information Age this year, chief architect Stuart Curley said that the technology is only now approaching affordability.
However, Microsoft’s entrance to the CEP market – announced in 2009 – is likely to impose downward pressure on cost, particularly because its CEP offering, StreamInsight, will be a feature of SQL Server 2008 R2 DBMS, available at no extra charge.
A popular, albeit clumsily named, concept in information technology is the ‘Internet of things’. This concept describes a world where machine-to-machine (M2M) communications enable intelligent devices and objects to ‘talk’ to one other and report on their current location or state. If this vision is to become reality, organisations – and the people who work for them – will need a way to cut through the chatter and listen only to those conversations that require action to be taken. And CEP is starting to provide an accurate way of doing just that.
The future is complex
From machinery in manufacturing plants to mobile phones and heart monitors, today’s devices are ready to start talking. In many cases, they are already chattering away, using M2M communication to report on their status, convey data to other machines and to receive instructions remotely.
It’s been a long time coming, but in 2009 the M2M industry finally gathered real momentum with the delivery of numerous robust, mature projects that enable physical objects to connect wirelessly using sensors, transistors and RFID tags.
By the end of 2009, according to analysts at research company Berg Insight, M2M communications accounted for 1.4% of all mobile network communications worldwide, although the share was higher in territories such as the US (4.3% of all mobile connections) and the European Union (2.4%). By 2014, Berg Insight’s analysts predict, M2M will account for 187.1 million mobile connections, or 3.1% of the worldwide total.
With far more devices coming to market enabled with built-in connectivity, interest is building in complex event processing technologies as a means to filter out some of the ‘noise’ and extract meaningful business insight from the M2M babble.
According to Teresa Jones of Gartner, the primary drivers of CEP technology in the years ahead will come from ‘sense and respond’ and ‘situation awareness’ applications that alert them to events that require intervention, be it automated or manual. These applications, she suggests, might include:
• Cargo tracking
• Fraud detection
• IT operations management
• Logistics, transportation and fleet management
• Mobile asset management
• Supply chain management
• Track and trace applications, to report the history of food from ‘farm to fork’ or track pharmaceutical products from factory to consumer
• Vehicle security automation
