If you have not been convinced of the hype that mobility is overtaking desktop computing, consider this. Sale of the iPhone alone has surpassed the revenue of Microsoft in its entirety. The software giant whose big earners are Windows and Office, who has dominated and still dominates the operating system market, was overtaken by a phone. This may seem like a nonstarter in 2012, when everyone knows how popular the iPhone is, but consider that the iPhone only began selling in June, 2007. In Q4 of last year the iPhone sold 37 million units worldwide for $24.42 billion in revenue in a market that Apple entered less than five years ago. With that in mind you probably think I’m crazy to posit that innovative software, not hardware, drives revenue, truly transforms businesses, and captures entire markets.
Behind the Scenes: Software Reigns Supreme
Is it Event Processing? No, its just Sharepoint…
The UK’s Register had an interesting white paper advertised as “University Hospitals Bristol gain real-time view of bed availability”. As healthcare is one of the next IT wastelands that could really benefit from event processing (think real-time medical monitoring, patient track and trace, specialist resource real-time optimization, etc), I was disappointed to find this was an advertorial for… Sharepoint! It’s a bit like TIBCO claiming its Portal product provides the smarts for a real-time dashboard, rather than just being the container for such displays. One hopes that UH Bristol is doing a bit more than just having some web part polling some database with “end-of-day” ward bed reports and then relying on doctors telephone the wards to try and book any available beds…
[For non-UK readers, UK hospitals are usually managed under the National Health Service: like any government body, it is widely considered as heavy on bureaucracy and light on "customer focus", with a common budget-saving mechanism of closing patient wards leading to situations where hospital beds are scarce resources.]
Good week for Event Stream Processing…
… with the announcements and discussions of Microsoft’s SQLServer-or-.NET-library-no-one -seems-quite-sure-yet stream processing tooling, and then IBM’s you-can’t-have-too-many-CEP-tools System S announcement. Looks like IBM has donated this software to some good causes as part of its beta program – good on IBM – although presumably future users will be expected to pay for the technology.
These arrivals mean that, finally, all the Big 3 (Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) have now declared some interest in query-based stream processing. Possibly this will increase interest (from a somewhat low base) for standardising SQL extensions (syntax and semantics) for continuous queries (as also provided for in TIBCO BusinessEvents 3.0 and later). We’ll see…
