Those systems exist, but they are ad-hoc. That is, people implement their own in-house solutions as needed. We're trying to provide a language and runtime that allows developers to only focus on writing streaming applications - they don't need to worry about implementing their own infrastructure or way to describe their applications.
Your post got me even more confused: what exactly new programming models? I understand there may be an influx of sensor data coming in and your apps have to be able to cope with them --- do specific data analysis, maybe some kinds of expert systems, and generate possible suggestions. But how is that different from existing systems, say, nuclear station operation system, high-frequency trading systems, to name a few.