Dan Caselden was up late on November 3, 2018, playing the video game Counter-Strike, when he made astronomy history. Every time he died, he would jump on his laptop to check in on an automated search he was running of NASA space telescope images. "It was very confusing," said Caselden. "It was moving faster than anything I've discovered. It was faint and fast, which made it very weird."

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is having a big impact on lots of areas within enterprise IT, and data analytics is one of them. Companies are gathering huge volumes of information from all kinds of connected of objects, such as data about how consumers are using certain products, the performance of corporate assets, and the environmental conditions in which systems operate. By applying advanced analytics to these incoming streams of data, organizations can gain new insights that can help them make more informed decisions about which actions to take. And with companies placing IoT sensors on more and more objects, the volumes of incoming data will continue to grow. "Sensor-based computing is a core trend in digital transformation," says Maureen Fleming, an analyst at research firm IDC.