People seem to be confused about what IBM's System S actually is. For a more technical look at their new offering I suggest these two posts: http://www.dbms2.co

People seem to be confused about what IBM's System S actually is. For a more technical look at their new offering I suggest these two posts: http://www.dbms2.com/2009/05/13/ibm-system-s-infosphere-streams-processing/ http://www.dbms2.com/2009/05/13/ibm-system-s-infosphere-stre... http://www.dbms2.com/2009/05/18/followup-on-ibm-system-sinfosphere-streams/ http://www.dbms2.com/2009/05/18/followup-on-ibm-system-sinfo... Quick summary: It's for doing complex event processing of large streams of data. Think financial data or any other such sort of never ending flow of massive amounts of data that you would need to process very quickly to identify patterns and for other analysis such as determining when you hit certain thresholds or trends. It's supposed to be very flexible so that it can act on a large amount of unstructured data as well as very scalable. It defines its own processing language too.