What is Happening? Cloud, Mobile, and Social applications have competed for their places in the enterprise over the last few years. Now that these interrelated applications have emerged as part of the new master architecture, which Saugatuck has termed the Boundary-free Enterprise™, we believe that businesses will be able to refocus their IT teams to expand business capabilities, rather than concentrating so much of their time on renovating and maintaining existing systems (1054RA, The Emerging Master IT Architecture – Client / Server Gives Way to CMSA, 12 April 2012). We expect sensors and sensor data generated from real-world conditions and activities will be leveraged to enable IT departments to deliver real-time business value, and will make an important part of the expanding business and IT capabilities in this new Master Architecture.

Why is it Happening? Sensor data can create real-time Information streams, which provide information about business processes, computer systems, and environmental changes. In addition to dedicated sensor hardware such as gas flow meters, seismic monitors, or GPS devices, reporting software or hardware can often be added on to leverage existing sensors and to create real-time data streams. Some examples of this include temperature and drop sensors in laptops to identify systems which may be running incorrectly (or have been damaged) and leveraging accelerometers in smart phones to judge daily physical activity. Because sensors provide information in streams, though, they represent both a problem of building out infrastructure of the sensors themselves as well as and managing the information that must be stored and analyzed.