A few months ago we speculated that events (and event processing) “in the cloud” would probably appear best suited to some social networking type of application (in addition to the usual Platform-As-A-Service remote “systems center” use case). Lo and behold, TIBCO has introduced a corporate “twitter-type” service called tibbr for distributing messages across an organization, deployed into the cloud, and based on the TIBCO Silver cloud product. Soft of antithesis of MS Sharepoint…

For those wondering on the relevance of tibbr to TIBCO CEP technologies, note that TIBCO Silver exploits TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP technology under the covers. tibbr also exploits  TIBCO ActiveSpaces. As for tibbr potentially being used as an event channel for direct processing of tibbr messages in BusinessEvents - well this should certainly be possible, but finding some good use cases might be a challenge.

EBizQ had an article on cloud governance that raised the issue of the particular needs for governance in cloud applications: if you are to delegate application operational control to a third party, you sure what to make sure there are appropriate SLAs in place.

The article referenced services firm OpenCrowd’s Cloud taxonomy - which covers technologies related to TIBCO like DataSynapse, but seemingly missed TIBCO Silver and a few others. TIBCO Silver, of course, exploits TIBCO CEP technology to provide aspects of governance and control of cloud applications.

Of course, “non-cloud” applications require governance too, and the challenge is to find methods that enable governance with minimal runtime or development costs… some TIBCO offerings here are:

• ActiveMatrix (the TIBCO SOA suite) covers things like lifecycle governance, policy management and performance management
• Active Service Gateway (based on TIBCO CEP) provides high performance service routing and policies.

With Silver, ActiveMatrix, and ASG exploiting CEP in this area, I think we have a (small but discernible) trend here.

IDC’s Stephen Hendrick gave the keynote on the 2nd day of BRForum, titled “BRMS at a Crossroads”. The gist of Stephen’s talk was the need for BRMSs to evolve to the next level. Interestingly this seemed to be the first conference mention of “cloud computing” - a welcome respite from the hype about remote deployment platforms - as “cloud” was one of the future trends that businesses needed to exploit, along with open source, visualization platforms, and, naturally, decision management…

Stephen started with an overview (based on IDC research) of the BRMS market: in 2008 this was worth $285M with a “10.5%” annual growth, with the 2 leading BRMS vendors taking 40% of that market. Of the 7 BRMS vendors he mentioned, TIBCO was rated as being joint 2nd due to its “strong legacy in rules and being well positioned to execute”…

He then introduced the “IDC Decision Framework”: measuring the “scope of decision” vs “degree of automation” vs “no of decisions” vs “level of collaboration” for any application area.

Onto the vision of a future Decision Management platform: this  needs better “data preparation” (which maybe means MDM)  and “decision refinement” (covering predictive analytics). But CEP events needed to drive the decisions, whose decisioning context was defined as handled by “state“. All these management constructs obviously mapped to a runtime platform for “active decisioning” / “always on” behavior…

Justifying the CEP connection, Stephen mentioned that in 2008 at least 20% of BRMS/decisioning deals had some kind of “real time” orientation which was expensive to handle in the “passive BRE” environments.

The key concept Stephen described was the move from the “process centric to information centric” approach. Sharp intake of breath from the BPM community present… however Stephen explained that fine-grain rule and event control and parallel processing were key, and useful, features of the CEP world.

Stephen ended with the comment that “cloud computing” will also be event-driven - so decision management platforms that are event-based will makes sense in the cloud deployment world. [And funnily enough, CEP certainly plays a role in TIBCO's Silver cloud offering].

From a TIBCO perspective, clearly the concept of state management and modeling, with event processing, decision management, MDM and analytics are all part of the “best practice” decision platform. Probably the “information centric” world will not replace the “process centric” world any time soon, but for those customers want to take this route, its good to know there are already vendor solutions…

Meanwhile, Sandy’s view of the talk can be found on her blog…

A post on exploiting (in this case for air quality monitoring) the ultimate live sensor grid - the world’s cellphone population - reminded me of some discussions on CEP for social / community uses (as described by Prof Mani Chandy at the recent ISS09) and also some dicussions with TIBCO colleagues on the role of CEP in the cloud (e.g. supporting such large scale sensor nets without particularly low latency needs). The big question with either - who will pay for it - which translates to - who will it make / save money for?

TIBCO has announced its acquisition of DataSynapse - a grid/cloud infrastructure company. Although clearly this acquisition is more pertinent to the TIBCO SOA and Cloud stack (ActiveMatrix and Silver), it nonetheless is yet-another-source-of-events to be monitored by something like TIBCO Service Performance Manager (an operations application built on TIBCO BusinessEvents). There is an increasing market for such IT operational intelligence applications - indeed a quick search found this one plugging Esper into DataSynapse, for example.

No doubt there will be more news on DataSynapse later