Event stream processing technologies, sometimes called complex event processing, were first pioneered a few years ago in the capital market and trading systems where the need for processing massive streams of transactions with very low latency was an absolute necessity. Today the use of event stream processing technologies is expanding to many areas from real time marketing to online fraud detection. Amongst all this expansion there there is one domain that is expanding so fast that the need for such technology is becoming crucial: intelligent devices.
The world of intelligent devices, what we often see referred to as the "Internet of Things," is the next big data explosion.
For those who don’t know, the Internet of Things (IoT) is about getting devices and sensors (things) connected to the rest of the world in much the same way people are today through the Web and smartphones.
At the forefront of adopting machine connectivity are utilities, government, transportation, health care and finance. Intelligent transport solutions can speed up traffic flows, reduce fuel consumption and save lives. Smart grids can lower energy consumption and enable more renewable energy sources. Remote monitoring will provide convenient access to health care, raise its quality and save money. There are numerous examples of remote monitoring, improving security in homes and airports, for instance, or monitoring patients in a discreet way – for example, shoes or doors can be programmed to send a signal if they are not used for a certain period of time. Connecting your wallet, or rather turning your mobile device into a wallet or even a bank, is another example of the radical impact that connecting an everyday object may have.
Whole industries can use wireless sensors to monitor different processes and connect their entire business end-to-end. In Swedish sawmills for example, logs are harvested deep in the forests in specific lengths based on timber ordered by customers. Even individual trees are being monitored to ensure a better crop and to plan the harvest more efficiently.
Cisco thinks that about 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020 and there's no doubt that devices connected to the Internet of Things will soon be flooding the mass market. We'll see compact, connected sensors and actuators make their way onto everyday consumer electronics, household appliances, and on general infrastructure. As a result, there will be a massive increase of data generated by these devices pouring into our network and systems. Billions of information events generated every second, that have to be processed, analyzed stored and aggregated to provide a meaningful information that can be ingested and used by users.
Today SAS already offers solutions to provide analytics and predict device behaviour such as SAS Asset Performance Analytics. Now, with the addition of the SAS Event Stream Processing, we have a very complete solution to process streams of data coming from all these sensors, provide real-time surveillance, statistical analysis, correlate events and device behavior with probabilistic analysis and react in real time to potential premature failures that may dramatically impact production systems.
To learn more about how event stream processing can make a difference, view the white paper “Understanding Data Streams in IoT."
