Technology challenges for the global real‐time enterprise

This paper reviews the real‐time enterprise from a technology point of view, with a strong focus on the challenges of building globally scalable technology. We analyze the different aspects of the real‐time enterprise and the link between the real‐time functionality and event driven systems. We then review the major bottlenecks in achieving scalability and robustness for event‐driven systems when they need to support global enterprise systems. At a conceptual level the real‐time enterprise is extremely promising but neither research nor product groups have the technologies to operate at a global scale in a manner that will allow the real‐time enterprise to become a reality, unless a number of significant hurdles are removed. This paper examines the impact of the concept of the real‐time enterprise on research agenda of academia as well as product groups, and lays out an agenda for achieving scalability and reliability goals.