Thanks to twitter friend @darachennis, I can share a BBC News article on the use of event processing for real-time business beyond Wall Street. For context, the article describes the use of complex event processing in trading scenarios, citing implementations of Apama and Streambase at a variety of institutions.
As the article continues, other real-time business scenarios are called out, such as port management (logistics), retail (inventory), telecom (network management), healthcare and defense (think spooks).
“Now, real-time processing software has spread beyond Wall Street and the City to other industries.
Apama is used by customers in the Netherlands – Rotterdam has the largest port in Europe, with an annual through-put of about 400 million tons – to manage the logistics of ships, which often fail to arrive on time and spend hours waiting to dock and unload at ports, wasting fuel, money and time.
Rather than wait until the end of the day or week, supermarkets and other large multinational retailers use the software to monitor their stock inventories in real-time.
Telecoms companies are using it to manage the strain on their networks. Mobile phone firm Three, in Italy, is using Apama to test whether it can offer customers faster music downloads – for a price – when network usage is low.
SAP’s software is also being deployed on offshore oil rigs and even in hospitals around the world. This allows diabetic patients, for example, to have their blood sugar levels monitored and insulin administered if it gets dangerously low.
StreamBase has discussed using its software to monitor patients in hospital, looking for abnormalities and alerting doctors immediately, before the situation becomes critical.
Mr Sikka says a large British gas company recently started using its software to analyse the data from smart meters of 60,000 customers in London, and discovered that there was a spike in energy usage around 7pm.
The firm changed its tariffs to account for that.
Future applications that are being discussed include the military, such as real-time monitoring of troop and tank movements. StreamBase is already used by the US National Security Agency to monitor security threats.”
I couldn’t agree more with the article’s closing quote, offered by Streambase CEO Mark Palmer, “It’s difficult to think of an industry that isn’t affected by real-time".
