Streaming data is the new technology frontier

TIBCO today announced its purchase of StreamBase, a software company focused on streaming big data and very successful in capital markets and government intelligence, among other verticals, where the ability to process fast-moving data with very low latency is absolutely essential to the business.

Big data is hot

We know big data is all the rage, even making headlines this past week as the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was revealed to have a massive-scale big data program known as PRISM. But what’s creeping up on us every so gradually is the requirement to grab and manage faster and faster big data that forms continuous ‘streams’.

The vanguard for this change may be capital markets and intelligence, but it has the same value in retail, manufacturing, energy and soon, anything that can be digitized and sent over networks. Streaming big data is the new black.

Events at the heart of streaming big data

StreamBase CEO Mark Palmer talks about the acquisition in an interesting way:

What I think this merger represents is the creation of really a one-stop shop for everything that you need to deal with events and become an event-driven, real-time enterprise.

Palmer brings up something that isn’t always talked about with big data in the craze over Map Reduce and Hadoop…the fact that big data carries precious information about discreet events. Events are occurrences (or non-occurrences) that have meaning to an organization. Most importantly, events form patterns that can be discovered and planned for in systems that become forward-looking rather than reactive.

Event-driven enterprises

Some of the world’s top companies like FedEx are event-driven and it forms the core of their ability to compete across borders, cultures, weather, and despite seasonal surges. Welcome to the world of streaming data…we’ve turned a corner and we’re never going back.