Two events last month showed indicators of a convergence between the analytics world and CEP world.

Firstly Louis Bajuk-Yorgan from TIBCO Spotfire attended the Predictive Analytics World conference in San Francisco. He reported that:

Three key themes showed up multiple times throughout the talks-the growing importance of text mining, the application of net lift modeling to determine the real results of a marketing campaign (ignoring those people who would have bought anyway), and (most interesting to me) the importance of operationalizing predictive analytics.

In his opening keynote speech, Eric Siegel (the conference chair) saw the most important innovation in the field of Predictive Analytics focused on applying predictive analytics to operational decisions (as opposed to more established application areas such as customer churn & product recommendations). In a later talk, James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions (and co-author of the great book “Smart (Enough) Systems”), echoed Eric’s emphasis on operational results, encapsulated in the phrase “Action support, not just decision support.” James advised building an analytic platform that focused on the end game: the need to operationalize analytic decisions.

This is great validation for us, since operationalizing analytics is at the heart of TIBCO’s vision for its combined platform with Spotfire and S+ (as shown in products like Operations Analytics).

Then a week later Andreas Gerst from the TIBCO BusinessEvents team presented at cepconf in Munich, Germany. Andreas presented on CEP and Data Mining, and in particular how both these complement each other for advanced operational intelligence around customer management. Andreas used TIBCO BusinessEvents and TIBCO Spotfire Miner as his example technologies, mentioning techniques like PMML for moving from analytics to real-time event processing technologies.

Interesting to see 2 of the 4 keynotes at TUCON this year (May 10-13, Vegas) are complex event processing customers: Dr. Sumit Chowdhury, CIO, Reliance Communications and Jan Marshall, VP of Technology and CIO, Southwest Airlines. The TUCON theme this year is “Discover the technology of Now”, but perhaps it should have been “Operational Excellence via Operational Intelligence”!

What you dont want to see in a presentation

While presenting to TIBCO CEP customer Societe Generale today, I had to make excuses for the example of “unintelligent operations” appearing in my presentation. To wit, whilst in the TIBCO Paris office earlier I had connected to the network to check emails, after which I put the PC into “standby” to facilitate a “quick start” for our presentation.

Big mistake: when I started the presentation, I got the infamous “Restart Windows” dialog. Dang! Unbeknown to me, when I had connected the PC (running a corporate XP set-up with compulsory Windows Update set to “on”) in the office it had gone ahead and downloaded a Windows update in the background. It promptly finished its install and requested a reboot when I started our presentation…

The intelligent behavior here might be to coordinate background downloads and installs with the PC user’s calendar. Other intelligent behavior, which we are seeing more of in TIBCO, would be to voluntarily bypass such corporate policies through the use of a Mac, Linux, or maybe run the “corporate PC settings” in a virtual Windows session

PS: one solution to keep up one’s sleeve is described here: however, this must be done “per session” as the TIBCO IT guys, not easily outsmarted, do things like thwart VPN access when certain services are disabled! The reboot message was just annoying; the total loss of PC responsiveness when the corporate antivirus scan kicks-in would have been disasterous!

Time to start the 2010 list of “interesting” CEP and rule-related conferences…so far I have 4 5 on the list, covering 2 3 weeks in May to July…  (yes I had forgotten Dagstuhl…). So, by date order:

• Week starting 16 May, location Europe:
  • 2010 Dagstuhl Event Processing seminar, Dagstuhl in Germany, 16-21 May, theme = task-oriented, focused on a joint effort between the academic participants and the industrial participants (vendors, customers, analysts) … output will be a manifesto for the event processing discipline…
• Week starting 21 June, location USA:
  • OMG Business Rules Symposium, co-located with the OMG Technical Meeting in Minneapolis, MN, day TBA, likely to cover the OMG rule standards such as SBVR (for documenting business rules) and PRR (for production rules)…
  • Semantic Technology Conference / RuleML co-organised Rules Track, San Francisco, June 21-25, theme = semantic rules [...are] more powerful, flexible, and active forms of “structured” knowledge…
• Week starting 12 July, location UK:
  • ACM’s DEBS2010, Cambridge, July 12-15, theme = dissemination of original research, the discussion of practical insights, and the reporting on relevant experience relating to event-based computing… which was very interesting last year, and is “in cooperation with” the EPTS.
  • Rule2010 workshop, Edinburgh, July 14, theme = rule-based programming in Industry and the Semantic Web… which seems a bit wide to me (i.e. there is not much “semantic web” overlap with “industry”).

RuleML09 was co-located (and partially consecutively with) BRForum09 this year, and TIBCO presented a keynote on day 2 on why rules matter in CEP . RuleML is more of an academic conference covering things like rule standards (such as W3C RIF and OMG SBVR), and had an event processing track too.

I hadn’t twigged before now that a title like “Rules Matter in CEP” could be misinterpreted in a “rule markup language conference” as “CEP uses a new way of representing rule fragments we call Rule Matter” - but luckily no-one seemed to have been misled… although I must admit it might be a neat name for a rule format :).

It was good to see all the “great and good” in current rules and standards research at this event, although there was not much overlap with the “great and good” who had attended ORF the previous week. It seems strange having 3 rules conferences in 2 weeks, although I do wonder if the other vendors in EPTS will be cursing me for possibly raising CEP as a future mainstream topic at these events.

Some of the Q&A was interesting. For example, why should “rule inferencing” be important (i.e. algorithmic rule chaining over using events to cause other rules to fire). My rule engine industry colleagues from IBM Ilog wanted to know why their rules engine wasn’t represented on the list of CEP vendors (answers on a postcard, please). And why weren’t other algorithms like Bayesian networks used more in CEP (good question…).