Earlier this week, I offered my one and only prediction for 2010: “Event Processing transcends niche status, to well-recognized & adopted business technique for real-time visibility & responsiveness.”
Mark Palmer, CEO of StreamBase, stopped by to offer 9 points of CEP momentum, primarily from the Streambase point of view, but included some broader milestones, such as the recent publication of Roy Schulte and Mani Chandy’s Event Processing book.
In addition, Mark alluded to big forthcoming announcements. One of which, I have to imagine, is yesterday’s announcement that Streambase was named a 2010 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer:
“StreamBase Systems, a leading provider of Complex Event Processing (CEP) technology, announced today that it has been named a 2010 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Candidates for this prestigious award are nominated by the world’s leading technology experts and judged by a distinguished panel appointed by the World Economic Forum. As a recipient of the Technology Pioneer award StreamBase will attend the 2010 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Recipients of the Technology Pioneer award include Google, Mozilla, PayPal and Twitter.
“We congratulate the newly selected Technology Pioneers for their remarkable achievements and welcome them to the wider community of the World Economic Forum. During these difficult times, we are certain that the technologies driven by these visionary companies will contribute to the next wave of growth, with the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that characterizes them,” said André Schneider, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of the World Economic Forum.”
The World Economic Forum describes the Technology Pioneers Program as follows:
“The Technology Pioneers programme is the World Economic Forum's way of identifying and integrating those companies – normally in a start-up phase or in their first rounds of financing – from around the world that are involved in the design and development of new technologies. The innovations of these companies reflect society’s attempts to harness, adapt and use technology to change and improve the way business and society operate.”
The Technology Pioneers 2010:
“The 26 companies selected as Technology Pioneers 2010 represent some of the most innovative start-ups from around the globe whose innovations will have a critical impact on the future of business and society.
The Technology Pioneers 2010 are active in areas such as cloud computing and open source application management, social networking, financial inclusion through telecommunications, genome sequencing, responsive implants and wireless patient management solutions, waste remediation, fuel cell technology and the production of energy efficient building materials.”
A report on the 2010 Program — Embracing Disruption: Redesigning the Future — is available as a pdf. From the introduction:
“Disruptors by definition rethink and redesign, be it business models, innovation paradigms or societal progress. By integrating the Technology Pioneers into the activities and initiatives of the World Economic Forum, notably to the Annual Meeting 2010, we are certain these disruptors will also live up to the challenge of contributing to rebuild and improve the state of the world.”
The StreamBase selection write-up:
“Traditional database systems cannot keep pace with the continuous data streams produced by global electronic transactions and sensor networks. So, in 2001, StreamBase’s future founders at MIT started work on the “Aurora” project to investigate the underlying principles required to design a new systems architecture for continuous real-time event data.
Before event processing, data had to be imported into a database, against which business intelligence queries were run to find patterns and answer questions. However, this approach did not offer actionable business intelligence due to the historical nature of databases, which produce answers long after data has been received.
Today, the deluge of continuous data streams from sensor networks and electronic transactions require immediate response. CEOs need real-time business information, governments need real-time intelligence, doctors need to track disease outbreaks in real time and traders in capital markets need to immediately identify trading opportunities. In these instances, each lost second costs money, lives or both.
Why the company is a pioneer: StreamBase’s customers span government, e-commerce and capital markets. Competitors include substantial players such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Sybase; however, StreamBase has already raised US$ 37 million in venture capital and is attracting marquee customers such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Royal Bank of Canada, the online travel agency Orbitz.com and the National Security Agency.”
Not only is this award a tremendous win for StreamBase, it’s a recognition of the potential of event processing technologies and techniques “to change and improve the way business and society operate.”
Congratulations to Mark Palmer, Richard Tibbets and the entire StreamBase team.
For more information on what the award means for StreamBase, see Mark’s blog post. To learn about how the CME Group is using StreamBase, see my interview with Steve Goldman, Director of Enterprise Architecture, CME Group.
