In a blog post about CEP being considered a supporting act for BPM and other technologies, Raimer von Ammon of CITT (University of Regensburg, Germany) commented about the EU proposal for a “U-CEP” (Ubiquitous CEP) research programme. In that comment Rainer mentioned the connection between CEP (an IT paradigm around events) and Biology (covering event-driven neural and evolutionary systems - Epigenetics and Brain Research) which form part of the U-CEP EU research programme proposal. Rainer has kindly elaborated some more on this topic, which IMHO is worthy of a separate post on this blog … and I note has parallels to one of James Odell’s posts on the “inside of an agent”…

Two or three recently emerging disciplines yield to a similar paradigm in order to explain how the environment (actually the universe of global event clouds) and their processing by sensors (respectively receptors and the activation of effectors) drive our daily life, but also the whole evolutionary process of life on our earth since the Big Bang.

The discipline of the New Biology or Epigentics has detected - on the basis of the nanotechnology, microbiology and cell biology – within the last years that the life of cells is determined by its physical and energetic environment and not by their genes. Genes are only the molecular “blue print”, the design pattern, on which the structure or architecture of cells, tissue and organs is based. But the environment as a global cloud of signals, energies or so called events are at the end responsible for the way of life of a cell. In each single cell the mechanisms of life are triggered by the processing of the “events” of its environment and not by its genes.

Since “quantum physics” and the “Heisenberg uncertainty relation” we know today that such events are at last energy as eddies of quarks and photons, but we can define different types of events, also on the physical level. Around 3.5 billion years ago the first monads as bacilli and algae lived on the earth, 650 millions of years ago the multicellular organisms as trees and other plants were created as a more complex and more intelligent life, and since around only 100,000 years the today’s human is a united cell structure of 50 trillions of single cells where each cell is doing event processing on the base of its receptors of its cell membrane. So, a human being can allegedly process 120,000 events per second unconsciously (by the right side of the brain), but logically a human can only process around (I guess) 7 or a few information units at the same time (by the left side of the brain).

Against this background CEP is based on a very similar model. EPAs (event processing agents) are actually cells where event adaptors are the receptors of a cell membrane and the event processing logic based on an EPL (event processing language) are the effectors of a cell. EPNs (event processing networks) are actually a united multicellular structure and so on.

The Epigenetics explains how the environmental signals (events) control the activity of the genes. The primacy of the DNA is no longer valid, and the new found information flow is now called the “primacy of the environment”. Recent experiments of The Epigeneitcs have proved that our beliefs and thinking is energy in the sense of environmental signals. The Epigenetics found that all these kinds of environmental signals influence the regulating proteins which control the activity of the genes and that the global event cloud as environmental signals influences and changes the DNS (so called reverse transcriptase).

What is an individual?
According to the Epigenetics an individual is determined by the sum of its receptors in the cell membrane of all its 50 trillions of (specialized) cells. Each individual is unique because it is controlled or driven by the protein machines of its cells as a result of the received events (signals) of the global event cloud of the universe. The global event cloud does always exist and each event is an undestroyable energy which exists always and forever (see Unus Mundus and space-time continuum).

The Epigenetics explains an individual as an analogy of a broadcasting of television programs where the adjustment buttons are the receptors of the cell membranes which determine which program we receive in which manner. If we add or switch off receptors, we receive a different program or we see the same program differently. This can be understood as the incarnation of an individual. On the basis of such a model we can explain phenonemas like reincarnation or time travel as well.

Results of the recent Brain Research
On the basis of recent experiments of the Brain Research, researchers like Wolf Singer, Gerhard Roth et al. claim that a free will does not exist. They believe that their experiments have proven that the brain region which is responsible for a deliberate decision is only later activated when a signal or event is received while the protein machinery as the activity activator was already started “long” before. This cognition that there is no free will could be supported by the Epigenetics and the functionality of a cell membrane and its receptors and effectors/event adaptors and EPA’s as the basis of the whole protein machinery and as the motor of life.

“If you think you think you only think you think” versus “Cogito ergo sum” (Descartes) …”

For the U-CEP course/textbook I’m gathering some materials since some time which I’ll add to the U-CEP doc within the next days; here are some nice video lectures as a basis for U-CEP enhancements/projects, e.g. from Bruce Lipton, I like him as a great guy and great lecturer:

http://epigenetics.uni-saarland.de/en/home/ (German language only)
http://www.tonyb.freeyellow.com/id68.html
http://www.veoh.com/collection/AgriculturalNews/watch/v378752sbRFQa3F# (video)

Great to hear that TIBCO might support such U-CEP ideas, perhaps Larry Ellison or also Bill Gates would be interested in supporting such things … as an investment in the future

A recent CEP RFP requested marketshare data for the “CEP market“, worldwide and in specific territories. Presumably the contracts departments for large enterprises are hoping that software development tool purchases are tracked by some industry body (Nielsens maybe) just like Cornflake packets and Persil washing powder. Unfortunately, this is not the case - and of course the definition of “customer” is itself open to interpretation (someone who uses the software? someone who paid money for the software? a licensee?). Some companies also embed “CEP software” in larger categories of software (e.g. messaging or BAM); others sell only stacks that might include CEP licenses, without necessarily any use of said licenses.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to try and find some data points here. Software companies generally make “customer numbers” claims via press releases and in analyst reports, as well as SEC etc reports, and these can be collated and cross-referenced to try and come to a “big picture”. Doing so finds some interesting details such as:

• the most recent available data (for 2008-2009) gives TIBCO BusinessEvents the leading market share figure of 28% (by number of customers)
• this market share number has pretty much remained constant (except for one anomoly year, when it was 10 points higher!) for the previous 4 years
• other established CEP vendor shares are 21%, 18% and 14%  - a pretty even spread overall, if the data is accurate
• the cutoff date for available data (early 2009) excludes any major effects from the large companies getting involved in CEP (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft) which, along with CEP market growth and the addition of many new startups, will likely make future numbers difficult to interpret
• vendors 2, 3 and 4 (in order of market share) report being almost exclusively (>80%) in financial / capital markets - so probably ~50% of business in CEP (to-date) is in the financial area
• overall market growth, year on year, was up to 60% initially, but dropped to just over 30% in the latest numbers. Something to do with the financial market meltdown, perhaps?

Opher Etzion wrote an interesting blog responding to analyst Phil Howard, which in turn provoked another response by Rainer Ammon. Phil had commented that the recent developments in event processing pointed to a convergence with “BPM” (and - per his own prediction and with somewhat less evidence - Data Warehousing).

• Phil says:
  …Then there was IBM’s acquisition of AptSoft in 2008, …with an emphasis on integration with business process management. And, of course, Oracle and TIBCO are doing much the same thing…
  I cannot speak for Oracle (who AFAIK have continued to develop the BEA event server as a part of the Oracle EDA and BAM, not BPM,  suite), but in TIBCO, CEP technology is considered an adjunct to BPM. Or course there are a number of patterns we see using CEP and BPM together, but in no way can TIBCO CEP be considered emphasising integation with TIBCO BPM. Indeed, more TIBCO customers use CEP together with SOA (AMX BusinessWorks) than with TIBCO BPM (iProcess or AMX BPM)…
• Phil adds:
  …So, the clear trend is towards integrating complex event processing with other types of process management, though these may not necessarily be with business process management per se…
  So, what process management is not business process management? Indeed we do see “business processes” implemented using CEP: this is the event/pattern - decision - action cycle that CEP tools provide. Instead of “integrating with”, think “more agile or dynamic business processes”. And although events provide great integration mechanisms, the implication that CEP is a mere “supporting act” is not seen so much in practice.
• Phil concludes:
  Indeed, we will have to wait to see if complex event processing becomes completely subsumed into other technology areas and, if so, what new acronyms the industry can come up with: what is the acronym for a convergence of complex event processing and business process management?
  Conveniently for Phil, Rainer has already coined “edBPM” for event driven BPM.
• Opher gives the wise man’s response:
  This is a similar situation to databases; database can be used for various reasons, and also be embedded with various other technologies and products…
  Which makes perfect sense: CEP technology can be used standalone and in supporting roles, and different vendors will see different markets and focus different technologies for each…
• Rainer adds a comment containing an interesting quote from a European solutions provider (who is not, AFAIK, working in the CEP space):
  CEP a lot was indeed now written all over the world and spun very much, and unfortunately it is also an unusual amount of charlatanism… A machine for example runs with very continuous transitions through the phase space of their operating states. The prediction of a complex event would be in this case e.g. the simple need for maintenance, even for conditions that were never previously in this exact combination … Even this simple example could solved only in a combination of methods.
  As it happens I have a nice successful CEP-based counterexample here.

From the last point, there is still seemingly a lot of education required for systems integrators and their architects and software designers - especially if they want to be involved in “charlatan event processing applications”! Luckily CEP vendors like TIBCO have partners folk who are more than happy to arrange webinars and talks about CEP and event processing to these folk. Just drop your TIBCO rep a line!

Forbes published an article suggesting some “high frequency trading” programmers have cut deals to earn them more of the profits from operating the trading applications they write. I wonder if CEP tool vendors - especially the ESP vendors usually involved in algo trading solutions - can do the same? I suspect this model is restricted to algo trading though - there aren’t many other apps that are so directly “profit generating”…

One of the neat changes announced in TIBCO BusinessEvents 4.0 was the recognition that as a declarative, distributed event processing platform covering multiple event processing use cases it provided very much a superset of functionality for many use cases. For example:

• a BPM user wanting to exploit Decision Manager may initially only be interested in the Decision Manager module and supporting rules
• a BAM project might only need Views dashboards and supporting rules
• a sense and respond application might only use state modeling (Data Modeller) with supporting rules
• a monitoring application might use Event Stream Processing and associated rules, possibly in conjunction with Data Modeling.
• etc

As a result, BE4 is structured into a core product providing the essentials like channels, events and concepts, rules and rule functions, distributed cache, monitoring and management, tester, etc, and a set of modules for specific functions and roles:

• Event Stream Processing
  = continuous queries and the event pattern matching framework
• Data Modeling
  = entity lifecycle management via state machines with direct database interaction via JDBC
• Decision Manager
  = decision tables and trees representing actionable business rules, with associated workflow management
• Views
  = real-time web-based dashboards

We will drill down into more detail on these modules in the coming weeks.