"Businesses are in the age of information overload. You have stock prices, market data, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, blogs -- all the information just coming out of your ears and being wasted," says Mahmoud.

"Each one of those points of information can lead to better forecasting and decision making when harnessed correctly, but it's also important it is collected in a reasonable amount of time to give businesses agility and a competitive edge."

An example of its use is in the financial sector, where banks and other financial institutions are constantly monitoring market data for the latest trends. Mahmoud says stream-data would enable those businesses to make better decisions on-the-fly without needing to wait several hours for the information to be compiled and analysed.

He says projects like SKA will help speed up research and development in stream-computing by bringing in business interest, but only if the infrastructure is interoperable with what is currently used in enterprise.

Mahmoud's research uses IBM's InfoSphere Stream technology as its parallelisation middleware to manage CPU usage and to hold queries. He says other stream-computing infrastructure, like that used by CERN for its Large Hadron Collider research, uses highly customised components which would be difficult to replicate for business use. "At CERN they use a protocol called White Rabbit to query their data. This is a very comprehensive system, but it's not interoperable with other protocols," says Mahmoud. "They manufacture everything right down to layer one, it needs special hardware and routers which couldn't be used by most modern businesses."