We’re excited to announce that, as of today, we are making a free version of Apama, called Apama Community Edition, available to anyone who wants to use it.
This means that anyone who wants to learn about Streaming Analytics and how they can put their own applications into production can do so by downloading the world’s leading Streaming Analytics tool from the Apama Community.
For those of you new to the world of Streaming Analytics, it enables organizations to monitor large volumes of information in real-time to spot significant, yet complex patterns of events and respond to them intelligently and immediately, while it’s still possible to do something to influence the outcome.
An example of this might be a water supplier measuring water flow in the water mains. By looking for differences in water flowing in and out of different parts of the system, they can spot and locate water leakages and burst pipes immediately. They might temporarily reduce the water pressure in that part of the network to reduce water loss and send a team to fix the leak before a member of the public has even noticed it.
Manufacturers are using the technology to eliminate production line failures by being able to predict that a part is likely to fail based on information from the production line. They can tweak production in the meantime and replace the part during scheduled, routine maintenance before it does fail.
It is being used by mobile phone companies to increase customer lifetime value by encouraging pay-go customers abroad who make a call when low on credit to subscribe to a value add service for cheaper calls while abroad either by text message or when they call to top up.
This technology is also being used by investment banks for trading and retail banks for fraud purposes. For example you might want to create a rule to buy or sell stock depending on how its value has changed relative to other stocks in the same industry or have a rule that says someone using a debit card for an unusual transaction more than a hundred miles away from the owner’s mobile phone might be indicative of a cloned card.
One of the creators of Apama built an application to monitor the level of the stream in his village, so he knows whether he is able to drive through the stream on his way home – there really is no end of applications. I’m hoping he will tell us more about how he put this project together in a future blog post.
To help you get started with Apama, we’ve created some video tutorials that show you how to build some reasonably straightforward Streaming Analytic applications and we will continue to add to these over the coming days, weeks and months.
We would also like to encourage you to contribute to the community. If you have some great ideas of how you have implemented or would like to implement Apama, please let us know.