There are a few events already lined up for CEP this year. In chronological order:

• AAAi Intelligent Event Processing 2009: 23-25 March at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA as a part of AAAi. Sadly this conflicts with the OMG Washington DC Technical Meeting (where the PRR rule modeling standard is expected to be finalized, plus a Semantic Technology information day). Papers include CEP for fraud detection and compliance.

• DEBS 2009: 6-9 July at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA - mixed academic and commercial R&D conference. Probably the main conference for CEP this year, and it’s expected that the EPTS meeting for 09 will be co-hosted with this event.

Other events that are expected to include some CEP coverage are:

• OMG real-time / standards in government: 13-15 July in Washington DC is expecting to have some coverage of CEP.
• Business Rules Forum: 1-5 Nov in Las Vegas. Apart from “intelligent decisioning” (where “intelligent behavior” should include “timely response”, and thence obviously includes event-based decisions!), a CEP workshop is planned. Probably there will be academic CEP papers at the co-hosted RuleML conference, too.

• Gartner’s AADI Summit: 7-9 Dec, also in Vegas, is expected to include the content of the prior Gartner Event Processing Summits.

The schedule looks much the same as last year, in other words. Conference organisers are probably anxious about the effect of the “economic climate” on attendance figures, and sponsors will be watching budgets very carefully - so it will be interesting to see how this lot pans out, and whether any interesting breakthroughs are announced this year!

A decade ago, software ISVs needed to provide compatibility with the application deployment engines of the day - namely the Websphere and Weblogic app servers, which grew quickly in importance after the appearance of the J2EE standard. One wonders if the time is right for event-based application providers to exploit and build upon the event-processing platforms from the main infrastructure players like TIBCO?

Let’s look at the components an ISV’s CEP application requires to run on a CEP platform like TIBCO BusinessEvents …

1. Event channel and destination / address information, and payload: this is for input/output event objects, typically handled asynchronously.

2. Event store: this may be local to the ISV application, shared with some larger application, or both.

3. Event processing agent(s): this needs to be compiled against the BusinessEvents libraries and defined, as a minimum, as a Java application that is invoked from a BusinessEvents agent. If desired or required, rule, state and query resources (defined in BusinessEvents) can be used. Distributed agents for scalability and performance (and resilience) need to be considered too, although these are design-time issues and the distribution/resilience is handled by the platform itself.

So what application areas make sense to exploit CEP platforms? Examples might be:

• Machine Learning: apply advanced algorithms to event clouds to determine new complex event types
• Vertical-market Event Processing: provide custom channels and processing components for domain-specific event feeds
• Optimization technologies: constraint logic programming and so forth
• Standardized Value Chain processes: basic event-driven process building blocks

For any other suggestions, add a comment below. To get started, check out and contact us via the TIBCO Partners pages…

Interesting to see the huge interest in Cloud Computing. David Luckham’s complexevents.com just referenced one of several recent Infoworld articles and blogs that attempt to define the term. Another compares the buzz to past excitements - remember Application Service Provider and Software As A Service? But Clouds are of direct interest to the Complex Event Processing community: CEP is, afterall, about processing clouds of events.

Just to be clear…

1. Complex Event Processing is another term for Event Cloud Processing: processing clouds of events, which may include multiple event streams of course.

2. Cloud-based Event Processing is where some event processing application is put into a closed / corporate, or public / distributed, cloud computing environment. Event latency and event store latency will be major considerations here.

It’s interesting to compare “cloud computing” with more conventional advances in distributed corporate IT. TIBCO BusinessEvents, for example, provides an “event cloud processing” (aka CEP!) platform that includes both the event processing and data cache agents. Will this ever be requested, or offered, as a cloud service by TIBCO or a TIBCO partner? Possibly. Application domains for this might be the interface between the social network and commercial IT worlds - consider things like medical drug programs, healthcare data collection, and so forth. We’ll let you know if and when it happens…

Dr Terry Halpin (of ORM fame) has published on BRCommunity.com a series of articles on temporal modeling. In his latest article he mentions the use of state models, as used in the TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP tool, but concentrates on some disjoint subclasses to describe role types of entities over time. Nonetheless, its an interesting series relevant to time-based event processing.

PS: Shame that BRCommunity is free-registration-required, but some good content on there…

With the inauguration of a new US President just around the corner, I’ve been ruminating on the forthcoming changes. It’s not an easy job to begin with, and since there’s so much work to do and he’s got a brand new team, I’m thinking President-elect Obama might be able to use Complex Event Processing and / or Business Activity Monitoring software.

Here’s how… (in the form of a top ten list)

Number 10

A new US Government operations visibility tool for the newly appointed Chief Performance Officer cabinet post.

Number 9

As a new Presidential dashboard with real power.

Number 8

Another reason to stick with his Blackberry - TIBCO CEP product BusinessEvents creates Blackberry alerts.

Number 7

Predict what Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will say and do next.

Number 6

Choose the new Presidential dog based on historical breed information correlated with new puppy attributes and real-time events.

Number 5

Automatically rebalance his personal 401K before Bernanke announces FED rate changes.

Number 4

New Affinity rewards program for frequent taxpayers.

Number 3

Make sure nobody plays the overnight commodities market with the bailout money float.

Number 2

Keep an eye on Hillary. As an added bonus, Hillary can use it to keep an eye on Bill

And the number 1 reason

oBAMa

That’s what I think, anyway. How about you? Let us know.