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!

Two more links of interest to the event processing community:

• Jim Sinur comments that the Japanese business process marketplace is “ready for dynamic BPM”…

A Goal of Greater Agility with BPM: The audience was keen to hear about the inclusion of complex events processing, business rules management, unstructured processes, process snippets and social technologies in the evolving BPM technologies. Japan has been a leader in standard processes for a long time and there is a need to make new and dynamic processes.

I see a continued differentiation in products here: for example, TIBCO AMX BPM is a very strong contender in the “conventional BPM” stakes, whereas the TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP tool us more for extreme performance, exception-riddled, unstructured (a.k.a. non-orchestrated) rule-driven operations… but of course these technologies can work together as needed.

• Doug Mow placed an article up on ebizQ on “Real Business Benefits for Real Time BPM”, covering “real-time claims adjudication” in the healthcare industry.

Using BPM to improve auto adjudication for claims validation, routing, eligibility check and payment submission can deliver huge gains.

This time it seems it is not CEP that is being confused (or conflated into) BPM, but business rules and decisions. Claim validation? Rules. Routing? Rules. Eligibility check? Rules. Payment submission? Ah - that could be a business process! And real-time rules are another term for event-driven rules… meaning, again, event processing.

Of course, this is not really “heresy” against the BPM community. The fact is that the term “business process” can be viewed as being much wider than the current BPM community - is not the detection of some event pattern a kind of process? In an agent that is matching events to decisions an event-driven process?

This year DEBS is in Europe, and in Kings College Cambridge, England - surely a model for the Harry Potter Hogwarts School of Architecture, with a quite amazing internal maze of staircases that entirely obviates any need for an on-site gym, while maybe requiring some kind of RFID-enabled roomkeys so event organisors can detect and rescue guests from obscure parts of the college.

Fellow Event Processing Technical Society colleagues Adrian Paschke (Freie Universitat Berlin) and Catherine Moxey (IBM CICS) and I presented a tutorial on the EPTS Event Processing Reference Architecture journey and development, with additional contributions from Alex Alves (Oracle) and Themis Palanos (University of Trento), on Monday this week. The presentation is now posted up on Slideshare (see below or here, or if in a Flash-free environment, check out the PDF).

One of the interesting audience questions was, if I recall correctly, why the EPTS Reference Architecture team did not differentiate their architecture more from that of, say, the BPM community? This was a little surprising as nowhere had we mentioned the words “business process” or “process orchestration”; neither had these really come up in the Reference Architecture discussions (other than as consumers of events). However, we did refer to the Fast Flower Delivery use case discussed in Opher Etzion and Peter Niblett’s forthcoming book on Event Processing, and Opher assured the audience that the event-driven processes therein were valid event processing requirements as opposed to BPM. An interesting point of reference here was the TIBCO user presentation at TUCON earlier this year that also found out the difference in BPM and CEP for their particular problem.

A related comment - from an end-user organisation - was that the sales teams of companies selling CEP solutions were often too quick to offer their BPM offerings rather than their CEP solutions. For an end-user to complain to vendors that “you are trying to sell me the wrong stuff” is pretty interesting! Wonder which vendors they were?

Forrester (and prior to that, long-time independent) BPM consultant Derek Miers often extolled the virtues of “case management” over “generic BPM” (and it was often commented that TIBCO BPM technologies were well regarded in this area). Yet until recently there seemed to be not much going on in the case management space except for the appearance of a few specialist case management vendors.

Then TIBCO and Cordys presented back in 2008 on “Dynamic Business Activity Modelling” that led indirectly to the current OMG RFP work on the “BPM superset” called “Case Management”. The pertinent TIBCO technologies we presented, over and above conventional BPM, were Conductor (goal-driven processes), CEP (rule and event-based processes), and combinations thereof (goals, rules, CEP, processes) such as in TIBCO AFF. Subsequently it seems that there has been a veritable explosion in interest around case management: for example, Fujitsu’s Keith Senson (chair of the WfMC) has published an acclaimed book on what he and WfMC are calling Adaptive Case Management. Per WfMC and the very popular LinkedIn discussion board on this, the area also covers the idea of social collaborations in “process” development and execution (another hot topic, per advocates such as Sandy Kemsley).

Processes, decisions, rules and event processing, with Inference Rule use cases

At the OMG meeting last week I discussed the nascent OASIS SAF framework with CA’s Paul Lipton, and its possible role in providing a standardised collaborative (a.k.a. “social) community framework for suggesting / organising / developing solutions (a.k.a. “processes”) to problems (e.g. business goals and issues - see BMM) … we will cover more on this idea later. Meanwhile, I offer the interesting observation that (1) SAF is based on the ideas of medical practices (symptoms, prescriptions, etc), and (2) case management’s widest use is probably healthcare (e.g. see the Wikipedia reference). Coincidence?

From the CEP perspective, I presented at OMG and SemTech this week the idea that business processes are just ways of organising events, decisions and actions, and that capabilities like Operational Intelligence are just advanced business processes - and are dynamic and “case oriented” too in many scenarios…

Prof Adrian Paschke invited me to present to his students this week on some of the real-world experiences of CEP versus the semantic technology space and the merger with the BPM space. Well, for the semantics study, we will be presenting some thoughts at the Semantic Technology conference next week.

On CEP and BPM, I should start first by pointing out TIBCO’s new ActiveMatrix BPM suite, that seems to have been very well received by the BPM world. BPM today is not the same thing as CEP, of course  - they are complementary components in an enterprise IT stack. But having said that, they both conform to the event-decision-action model - where as CEP tools concentrate on the events (and defining complex events in terms of other events) and decisions thereon, the BPM world focuses on the actions (ie process activities or tasks), and predefines many event-decisions as control flow in a BPMN model. But the idea here is that both these cover “process” in a generic sense, with different “models” (and hence deployment architecture optimisations), and for different use cases.

One of the TUCON2010 user presentations that brought this out was the excellent and detailed OOCL shipping line presentation, where they did 3 different implementations of an event processing use case (managing the milestones and subsequent exceptions for shipping - where shipping is of course the overall business process). From the data presented, and being unduly pessimistic in my interpretation of said data for the CEP part, I noted and derived the following:

Notes:
* Based on >100 milestones being defined
** 3 milestones were completed in the BPM project; however it may well have been that these were particularly difficult implementation-wise
*** TIBCO effort includes a POC (which probably shouldn’t be counted), and 4mths of “tuning” (which probably did not involve the full team) - without these the figure becomes 0.75 person years, and development cost per milestone a low 0.01 …
**** The reason for discontinuing the J2EE version was stated as being the cost of changes to business rules, new milestone implementations, etc.

One important fact here remains that the role of this application was to direct - or invoke - existing known business processes (implement in Oracle BPM). So while this particular application was clearly ideal for a CEP solution, it works very much alongside conventional BPM business processes…