I always thought Rolando Hernandez had an excellent idea with his “BRE Family Tree” - and had at some point tried to persuade Prof Luckham to do something similar for the “CEP market”. I was reminded of this by Opher’s blog on CEP and EDA in the current Gartner “hype cycle”, and as I had recently drafted such a CEP version for an internal presentation I decided to post it up here. The chart purports to show the “main players” in CEP today. Probably I’m missing some startups, or R&D offerings that have been commercially sold, and the start dates for such “commercial offerings” may be open to debate. But it shows the main players, at least. And it will be interesting to see how this evolves over the next year or so!

UK retailer Carphone Warehouse was in the news recently, announcing their transition to a TIBCO-based CRM system - in this case conventional workflows augmented by event- and rule-driven processes.

This use case has a good write-up (via MWD) available from TIBCO’s web site: some choice quotes are:

Background:
The Carphone Warehouse is a European telecommunications retailing and service provision group, based in the UK. The company is large, and has a record of fast growth: in its last financial year it reported revenues of over £3.9bn, but is still growing over 30% year­-on­-year. It currently employs around 20,000 staff in eleven markets. As its name implies, the company was founded as a mobile phone retailer. …

As is the case for so many large organisations, there came a point where the weight of “legacy” functionality became effectively unmaintainable in the face of continuing business change …  as a result, The Carphone Warehouse decided that as well as implementing a new billing system, it would also implement a new, distinct and separate CRM system. …

A service­-oriented approach to implementing the renewed billing capability and integrating it with the new CRM capability was identified and promoted early on … TIBCO products (Enterprise Messaging System and BusinessWorks) were selected for the SOA infrastructure … initially [the chosen CRM vendor's] inbuilt workflow functionality was selected as the platform for this. However as the project unfolded, the importance of long­-running processes, and asynchronous event-based flows … became increasingly apparent. It was at this point that the project team decided to extend The Carphone Warehouse’s investment in TIBCO technology to include the iProcess Suite (TIBCO’s BPM technology offering) and BusinessEvents (TIBCO’s Complex Event Processing offering).

Implementation:
The processes currently being implemented in the billing/CRM replacement implementation are focused on automating broadband service provisioning, and are prime examples of our “straight through processing” scenario …

The Carphone Warehouse is using TIBCO’s iProcess technologies to define and coordinate long­ running, stateful, system­-to-system integrations; it’s using TIBCO’s BusinessEvents technology to handle other stateful interactions, where there’s a need for near-­real-­time processing. …

Results:
…There’s already been one major success from this approach. In its retail business, the team has used the iProcess technology to deliver a reusable telecoms service activation process which has enabled the company to progress business expansion across Europe much more broadly and quickly than anticipated. The implementation cost just 20% of  the original estimate, and the reduced cost for retail operations “in territory” has made it much easier to roll out new network deals and offers.

Note: Carphone Warehouse are no doubt using TIBCO BusinessStudio to develop iProcess applications - so now is a good time to mention that BusinessStudio 3.2.0 is now shipping. Although this doesn’t cover CEP (or CEP-driven BPM), it does now include some iProcess Conductor (Gantt-based goal-driven BPM) features…

Waters Magazine has posted on their blog a video interview with TIBCO’s Robin Gilthorpe from earlier this month on the subject of TIBCO BusinessEvents‘ winning their “Best in Complex Event Processing Award”.

Paul Barsch (from Teradata’s Marketing Department) recently posted a blog on the acceleration of decision-making speeds in business, which is likely a concern to all software companies that have grown up around, and are tied to, traditional data-driven business intelligence and reporting. Paul specifically references an MIT Technology Review article and the “science of event processing” allowing responses in milliseconds - in other words, extremely low latency decisions.

The challenge with (1) speedy decisions is (2) ensuring accuracy - including regulatory compliance and matching decisions to business strategy etc - while achieving (3) low cost - taking into account both development and deployment - per decision and decision type. Combining all 3 is tricky - you need event processing for the speed, capabilities like decision management / inference rules / visualization tools / analytics for accuracy, and poweful integrated software development techniques to lower costs. In the past IT teams have had to get by with reduced capabilities here, such as not really achieving  (1) through needing to rely on a traditional database with its inherant file access transaction times, along with a traditional application server doing simple sequential processing of events. But nonetheless it is this combination of speed / accuracy / cost that is driving the development of Complex Event Processing technologies such as:

• event-driven rule-based distributed event processing - typified by products like TIBCO BusinessEvents
• distributed data sources for high performance data access - typified by developments such as TIBCO ActiveSpaces
• high performance middleware solutions - a long-term TIBCO speciality with TIBCO EMS and Rendezvous.

Notes: see also JT’s ebizQ  comments on this blog posting.

Colleague Saul Caganoff has posted some great diagrams explaining the relative values of CEP (i.e. for operational intelligence) and BI (i.e. for longer-term business intelligence) on his blog. Note the conclusion - they are really complementary.

Indeed, I would go further and explain that BI data exploration (as typified by TIBCO Spotfire) is one type of manual BI, and Analytics are another (sometimes more automatable) type (as typified by TIBCO S+ and Miner) - which can identify or tune correlations and detections in the CEP rules (as typified by TIBCO BusinessEvents).