Having sufficiently had a chance to recover from a very busy and very engaging TUCON TIBCO 2010 user conference in Las Vegas, I wanted to pass along a few observations and notes from my track this year which was the Optimization and Visibility track.  This was a very full 2 days of mostly CEP customer presentations with a smattering of industry IT analysts and TIBCO engineering presentations thrown in for good measure.

I’ll include this as a series and cover one presentation at a time.

First up is PepsiCo, co-presented with their implementation partner, Infosys.

The use case was how PepsiCo uses CEP software to provide more efficient and cost-effective usage of their company transportation fleet and other dedicated transportation partners.

In specific, they wanted to use their CEP software to provide advice on when to use their own transportation fleet, or use another carrier for consumer product shipments all over the U.S.  Previously, Pepsi was using a manual, labor intensive process to manage the process.

In researching this project it was decided that they needed to be able to dynamically deploy their policies (or business rules), and automatically create decision trees to reflect the changing dynamics and costs of the transportation industry, they needed real time information on truck locations and cost valuations, and to capture metrics for performance measurement.

They also covered the architecture and design of their deployed system which was implemented with the Pepsi IT team and Infosys.  He explained how they were able to develop simple and timed events to automate and manage the business rules with the TIBCO rule authoring tool, deploy customized and re-usable processes to extract data from a 3rd Party tool at regular intervals and provide enhanced performance by querying large amount of data as subsets and utilizing XSL and XPATH capabilities within the TIBCO software.

They also wanted to provide the ability to correlate events or create alerts based on events. He described it as “managing their company transportation events”

Example: If xx# errors occur in an hour, then send email to baseline support.

Example: If the Dedicated Fleet carrier has not reviewed their trip within 2 hours of offering, alert the Network Coordinator.

They also covered their business benefits– which included the ability to strategically identify the placement of dedicated and company fleet capacity, scale their fleet best practices nationally, and provide an agile software platform that gives them the flexibility to adapt to change via business rules that require minimum to no code change.

Key learnings from their project included his observation that they were glad they involved the business side early in the project in defining business rules, actions and data elements. PepsiCo also chose to build this CEP solution using iterative methodology principles to in order to keep the business side engaged throughout the project, specifically in the area of User Interface and Rule Authoring.

One of the speakers also covered ROI and payback– but we were sworn to secrecy.

In general, it was a well received presentation by the packed room.

But what I really liked about this particular session was that it presented by the guys who were directly involved and it was to Infosys’ credit that they let the Pepsi guys (and the project’s) success speak for itself.

CEP applications are often touted as to be so cutting edge and revolutionary, but it’s applications such as these “bread and butter” projects that seems to have made a difference in their everyday company operations and sometimes it’s those applications that turn out to be the most important of all.

More customer presentations later …

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.

Here’s a quick announcement that might be of interest to those of you reading our blog.

We have recently been informed that our most favorite CEP product, TIBCO BusinessEvents, has been nominated, and by virtue of independent judging and votes from the public, has now made it to the Finals of the American Business Awards aka The Stevies.

So if, like me, you have a strong affinity for BE, or would like to see any CEP product gain more positive non-industry exposure, you ought to head over to cast your vote at: http://peopleschoice.stevieawards.com/default.cfm

The category is for - New Product or Service of the Year – Computer Software, New Version: TIBCO CEP BusinessEvents 3.0

Final judging begins today through June 1st. I’m told that the race in these categories is tight and every vote counts.

The ABA plans to publicly announce the winners on Tuesday, June 9. The winners will be invited to attend the 7th annual American Business Awards banquet in New York on Monday, June 22 to accept their special People’s Choice trophy(s).

We will keep you posted on any developments.

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.

Interesting times here at TIBCO and beyond. In fact, it seems like according to the zeitgeist, it’s one of those tumultuous times where everyone is constantly reminded of pending change.

There’s also change of some sort in the political environment coming here in the U.S. I’m not going to take any political stands in this blog, but if you’re familiar with Greg Reemler aka “Greg the Architect” and the folks at Techrotech, they’re also contemplating change too. This one was too good for me not to share.

Lots of reasons for us all to re-evaluate how we cope with change… and CEP interestingly enough can help companies do just that. Recently, we concluded our event processing Online Summit and had the author, blogger and enterprise decision management proponent James Taylor as one of the keynote presenters. We had over 900 attendees listen and ask questions — many of which were along this line — What is the relationship and difference between CEP and BI (real-time and operational BI)?

The most noticeable difference is the event driven, real-time nature of CEP versus the query driven approach of traditional BI tools. CEP, at least in terms of TIBCO’s approach, is declarative which means the presence (or absence) of an event can determine how the business rules fire and ultimately how the system responds to the detected situation. In other words, BI makes you ask questions in order to get an answer and CEP gives you an answer based on real detected events.

CEP could utilize BI or analytics as a source of events or source of rules. You might be able to use BI to query a database to determine rules, but you would be better off applying the rules in real time in a CEP system to take advantage of CEP’s real time nature. This means you can detect fraud when it happens — not after it’s too late.

It’s a fundamental difference that event processing is based on data in motion versus the static “data at rest” in a database. CEP systems can usually detect more event sources and types than traditional BI which relies on a database. That’s the old way of doing things. CEP is also much better at finding out root cause and why something happened: users can drill down from a complex event to find what source events led to that situation (or complex event).

So that’s my story and I’ll stick with it. To those of you dealing with some sort of change, breathe in and hang in there. To those of you in the US, happy election – and make sure to get out and vote, even if it’s for Paris!