I attended the Event Processing Summit
in Orlando last week and probably the most interesting presentation was
given by Dr. Mani Chandi from the California Institute of Technology.
Mani did a great job of explaining the important role that event
processing plays today but it was his vision of the future that really
caught my interest.

Mani described what he said would be the next big thing in IT that
the analysts would be talking about in 2017. He took us through history
and explained how innovation focuses on the most scarce resources. In
the 60's the most scarce resource was the mainframe, namely the
computation power. From that, innovation led us to the distributed
model of client server computing. The next wave of innovation dealt
with the scarce resource of communication and bandwidth which led to
the great internet revolution and high speed access. The current wave
of innovation is in the area of integration and information, both
internal and external. There is such a high demand for systems to talk
to one another that SOA has become mainstream.

So what is the next scarce resource? According to Mani, it is time
and attention. Now that we have solved the issues with computing power,
communication and bandwidth, and application integration, the next
hurdle to overcome is dealing with the enormous amount of information
we have at our fingertips. The next wave of innovation may be focused
on some combination of Web 2.0 technologies, complex event processing,
and business intelligence. Here are Mani's predictions:

* Systems will predict your needs without explicit work on your part
* "CEO need in 2017 is what kids use today"
* We will move from a reactive web to a proactive web

Mani marveled over how incredible kids' sensors are today and how
they easily consume the continuous flow of information they subscribe
to. He sees a move towards user contexted BAM (Business Activity
Monitoring). Mani left us with some good advice:

Focus your development effort on the scarcest resource.

No votes yet