SCADA systems basically is the area you are interested in. Real-time industrial equipment monitoring (and control). Typically these are thick clients but peop

SCADA systems basically is the area you are interested in. Real-time industrial equipment monitoring (and control). Typically these are thick clients but people are clamoring for mobile and thin-client access to real-time data as well as historical time-series data. There are some very serious security threats in this space which is why the gorillas have leverage (not that they are really secure though). Time-series historians are expensive if you log a large amount of data. There are several attempts at this like OpenTSDB which is a historian on hbase and is where GE is trying to go. We looked at their offering briefly and its hard to say if hadoop is good enough for near real-time but it looks good for long-trend analysis I think.