Service-oriented architecture has already proven a disruptive force in the world or IT, but adding complex event processing (CEP) to it could create "a new physics of computing," says John Bates, whose research at Cambridge University in the U.K. helped pioneer the event-driven technology.

Computer applications have been interacting with data since the dawn of business computing, but what CEP and SOA do is turn the traditional model for data processing on its head, the British computer scientist says. What is emerging now is "a new physics of computing." With the traditional database structure, Bates explains, the model was to store and index the data so it could be queried by users and accessed by applications, but in the loosely coupled world of SOA, data is not stored, it's flowing from one process to another with new data constantly coming in on the wings of SOAP.