This week OMG’s Technical Meeting has had most buzz around the BPMN 2.0 submission (and congratulations to that team, for which TIBCO is a supporter). Some of the other stuff going on includes:

• PRR or Production Rules Representation (which, for complex event processing like in TIBCO BusinessEvents, can include event-condition-action rules using standard forward-chaining semantics) starts the Revision Task Force process for PRR1.1. A few tweaks are due, but more interesting was to see 2 more vendors attend the PRR session this week. Also, note that UML tool NoMagic is presenting on PRR at ORF’09 later in the year…
• DMN or Decision Model and Notation started on its first stage of development, which is the identification of use cases and roles for defining UML-based decisions for a future RFP. We had some good discussions (which I’ll report in a future post once I have reported to the DMN community), and it is clear that this could be a very key standard for business modelers, end-users and tool vendors. Of course the relevance of this to event processing is that many CEP/EP systems’ role is to support decisions…

A somewhat hotter debate continues (/is) regarding the proposed Case Management RFP, which was developed from a Dynamic Business Activity Modeling RFI last year (which TIBCO responded to, and was also covered by our session at the recent Semantic BPM day in Berlin). Many BPM applications are also case management applications, but some case management requires more sophisticated event-handling, rule-driven processes, decision management, and case record management and recording (technologies that TIBCO mostly covers under BPM+). One school of thought is that the more sophisticated requirements for case management need to be rolled into the common BPM standards stack (including BPMN); another is that multiple different standards should be used flor flexibility (such as combining BPMN with BMM, PRR and DMN). From an event processing perspective, of course, case management (by one definition at least!) involves applying incoming events to the state of some case in order to determine whether processes need to be started, continued, halted or changed - in other words CEP technology can often be applied for case management areas in government, finance, healthcare, etc.

Some of the other case management discussions can be found from EBizQ, Bruce Silver, and Derek Miers.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been an “Acting Project Manager” alongside a talented TIBCO team who designed and implemented a telco services gateway using TIBCO event processing software. Of course, the importance of the Project Manager role decreases in direct relationship to the experience of the team - so my role here was somewhat redundant due to the experienced implementation team. The project required Rapid Application Development exploiting a “standard set” of TIBCO technologies:

• TIBCO BusinessWorks to host the service entry and exit points
• TIBCO BusinessEvents for the main processing rules covering routing, validation, service throttles, KPIs, logging etc
• TIBCO EMS as the main external event (/message) transmission mechanism
• TIBCO RV for internal communications within the distributed application, e.g. for log handling
• TIBCO HAWK for application monitoring
• TIBCO Administrator for managing the deployment and updates to the application.

Some observations on the Project Management aspects were:

1. Good design counts: there were several specification changes (including to the specification of the incoming events) that were to some extent mitigated by the tooling flexibility, and some by the use of good design patterns.
2. Project Management is sometimes Anti-Agile: some of the (event) specification changes we deferred to later in the application development process in order to provide controlled, manageable, validated releases. The PM’s main role is obviously to protect the development team and delivery schedule from scope creep, although inevitably some scope changes were requirements boundary cases…
3. Test-driven development: early effort was expended in an appropriate test framework and test cases, used to exercise the event processing application with particular event types and patterns. This paid dividends in allowing defects to be identified, and resolved, early.
4. Communication and control artifacts: the High Level and Detailed Designs were defined in docs and in prototype BW processes and BE rules; we first used MindManager for internal reporting of issues, and then progressed to an existing Bugzilla instance for co-operation on issue management. Although we had an MS Project plan, we deferred to Excel for internal and customer reporting. Code and docs were controlled using SVN.
5. Knowledgable customer contacts (and good customer relations) make the PM’s job so much easier…

Some specific project challenges relating to the “event processing” aspects:

- Event definitions are key. If the event model is changing lots as development is occuring then this can be problematic. One traditional and effective solution is to use your own internal abstract event model and map to / extend this as required.
- Testing timed sequences of events could be a challenge. This project was event processing, not complex event processing (there were a few abstract KPI events created, but for the most part the application was stateless). Obviously, live system events are ideal for testing.
- Application performance (throughput, latency) need to be monitored and managed thoughout (although not an issue for this particular application, so far).

So - not much Project Management is specific to the “event processing” aspect. But that is good news and to be expected when insulated by a good development team and good tools!

Someone asked what other TIBCO blogs were around, as the “Communities” tab on www.tibco.com currently only mentions this, the CEP blog…

Here is a quick guide to the other TIBCO blogs…

• Cloud computing - the TIBCO Silver blog - answering questions about TIBCO’s approach to cloud computing for businesses…
• Spotfire community - the Spotfire blog(s) - answering mostly technical stuff about visual BI and analytics with Spotfire, S+, Miner etc
• TIBCO developer community - the TIBCommunity blogs - covering a wide range of stuff  (divided by product, including for BusinessEvents).

One of the interesting attributes of rule-based systems (whether in complex event processing, decision services, or whatever) is the ability for end-users to maintain the rules separately from the IT development cycle. Rule-based development tools (TIBCO BusinessEvents included) typically allow for the hot-deployment of these changes - usually where process instances are updated with the new application logic in between transactions or events. This update process is both inevitable and a requirement when the underlying ontology or Business Object Model changes.

There is however a class of update that is less obtrusive, and can be managed simply by a rule update event. This is where the rule design pattern (or template) does not change, but the change is a create / update / delete operation on such a pattern instance, stored as an object or concept. Alternatively the update could simply be to rule instance metadata (for example, champion-challenger status, or active status, or effective date). In an Event-Driven Decision system, such update events are simply a new type of event to be processed, and would typically be created by some suitable Business User Interface (or automatically generated by some analytics system). Of course, rule maintenance events themselves should be validated by the rule engine prior to deployment, and other controls such as security and authentication may be required.

Of course, with event-driven rule maintenance one has to decide where the *record* of the current rule instances is to be stored - either in running rule system (for example, exploiting the distributed cache), or local to the user interface. Alternatively one can resort to tradition, treat the rule instances as data in a database, and update them via a simple 2-tier UI using database-imported concepts in the rule-based system…

And with that, TIBCO’s newest offering, Silver is off and running. 

Announced yesterday at the NOWonline show, it seems to be getting a good bit of attention in the press, analyst and blogosphere communities.  eBizQ picked up on the announcement and commented on its use of CEP in the automation of cloud-app-balancing. As for me, my head is a bit cloudy at the moment, from all the fuss.

So what is Silver, and what does it have to do with CEP? 

Everything. 

TIBCO Silver is new software infrastructure for “cloud” computing.  A “Silver” lining for the clouds you might say. 

And why is this important for CEP? 

Because it’s an infrastructure product that embeds a CEP engine in order to solve problems related to governance (managed access, security, privacy and adherence to regulations), and scalability (uses SLAs to automatically scale up / or down as needed).  The kicker is that it’s automatic, so both the governance and the scaling is accomplished inherently through embedded monitoring, management and event-decision-action rules rather than manual intervention and programming -which AFAIK, is an achilles heel for current cloud products being introduced. 

This should be an interesting announcement for developers of different types of Business2Consumer or Consumer2Consumer apps that are likely to vary widely in resource requirements. The embedded governance allows for various levels of authorization, authentication and encryption policies to be dynamically configured. This is important because some services should be open to everyone and some services, well, just shouldn’t.

As in most cloud architectures, and not counting those who simply put the cloud moniker in front of their latest software product, there is no software to install or hardware to procure or provision, which reduces the barrier to develop and deploy rapid IT solutions (whether that’s infrastructure, platform or applications)

TIBCO Silver is currently in Beta. It will be interesting to see the deployments when they start rolling out.