An email from Layna Fischer, who is editor of the annual WfMC’s “BPM and Workflow Handbook”, tells us that the theme for the 2010 handbook is a “Spotlight on Process-Driven Business Intelligence (BI)”. To wit:

In 2010 we include a special spotlight on “Process-Driven BI” to illustrate how Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) are increasingly intertwined. Linking business intelligence and business process management creates stronger operational business intelligence.

Users seek more intelligent business process capabilities in order to remain competitive within their fields and industries. BPM vendors realize they need to improve their business processes, rules and event management offerings with greater intelligence or analytics capabilities.

We welcome submissions that include issues, case studies, guidance, solutions or research such as:

* BPM integration with collaboration, portals and BI
* BPM-BI with application assembly and deployment
* Dynamic event-based BI driven by BPM
* Embedding BI applications into business processes

Taking the 4 points above:

1. BPM integration with BI - this is quite an easy one as reporting (BI) on the process statistics gives insight into the long term performance of your processes - and thence areas for improvement. An obvious TIBCO example is TIBCO iProcess Spotfire - although this is more analytics than simple paper reporting…
2. BPM-BI with application assembly and deployment - I have to confess I have no idea what this phrase means! Is this BPM and BI for the software development process, perhaps? I have a feeling it is something to do with the aspect of BPM that is “visual coding” of straight-through-processes (for the event community: using BPMN to write single-event-handling applications). Traditionally there is usually insufficient data around to justify regular changes to traditional business processes, but this changes with the advent of analysis. Indeed the need to change processes often can lead to the use of things like rule-driven processes… a pretty common use case for TIBCO BusinessEvents in fact!
3. Dynamic event-based BI driven by BPM - this too can have a number of interpretations!
   • “Event-based BI” could be “event-based analytics”, through CEP. You would normally expect such “events” to drive process changes or business processes directly (e.g. “oooh look, the market trend for “wimbles” has started to go up!”). So this would be detecting events to “drive BPM”, not the other way round.
   • One could have a workflow to control manual views of your BI reports on incoming events - and this is again “BI as a process”.
4. Embedding BI into business processes - although this implied some “BI process” in a business process, I would expect it to be the simpler case of embedding BI results (decision changes, for example) into an existing business process - surely the classic use of BI in BPM… a slightly specialised case of the first point above.

But the above analysis is somewhat moot. More interesting is Layna’s assumption as indicated by the phrase:

BPM vendors realize they need to improve their business processes, rules and event management offerings …

So at least one BPM expert has come to believe that business process management encompasses managing events, rules, and processes… not just “process diagrams”!

If anyone is interested in submitting something on this, note abstracts are due Feb 17.

One of the probable future trends in event processing will be the merger of Predictive Analytics (per Wikipedia: “analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future events“) and Complex Event Processing… or basically the increasing use of advanced statistical techniques in event processing. Of course, for “current facts” (in Wikipedia) read “events” in the Event Processing community…

As an example, consider the diagram on the right, which details some of the algorithms available in such a predictive analytics tool (TIBCO Spotfire Miner), and how they relate to event processing (as when embedded in a CEP tool like TIBCO BusinessEvents). One thing to consider is that these algorithms are not likely to be specified by Subject Matter Experts or Business Analysts - who might ordinarily be relatively happy with the logical constructs in rule-based event patterns or queries.

I thought it would be a good time to update the CEP Market diagram. This covers all the main event processing application development tools (as far as I know). Compared to, say, the EPTS membership list there will be a mismatch - some EPTS members have not announced products yet, are in conventional (as in, not continuous / complex) event processing, or are focused on research.

I also thought it might be a good idea to bend the original rule for inclusion to add some of the fruits of the main players in CEP such as Dr Luckham’s Stanford spin-off ePatterns, as mentioned in his “Short History of CEP”.

It’s quite likely we’ll see more CEP merger and acquisition activity in 2010. Meanwhile it is the BPMS market that is currently in the news with a spate of takeovers (i.e. IBM with Lombardi, and Progress with Savvion). BPM is of course related to (and indeed a type of) event processing, albeit with a focus on standard operating procedures and processes  (exemplified by the “human-oriented simple event processing” that is workflow); but then, BPM is also considered a much larger market than CEP - at least in the first decade of the the 21st centory.

TIBCO’s contributions to event processing innovations in 2010 start appearing in merely a few weeks - it should be a good year!

Notes:

Start dates for tools and tool classification are not guaranteed:

• Start date is based on “available data” for “commercial delivery” (hence excluding lab-only “products”)
  
• Font size is meant to give a very approximate indication of number of (CEP tool) customers and thence indication of market importance. Yes, VERY approximate!

The end-of-year analyst report (aka “earnings call”) is where financial analysts listen to and question the corporate officers of a company like TIBCO on their end-of-year report card. TIBCO’s 2009 report (recorded Dec 22 2009) delivered by the CEO, COO and CFO had some comments relevant to the CEP business:

• TIBCO innovation in event store-and-forward approaches: the release of TIBCO ActiveSpaces
• “[I]t is actually substantially more valuable to have just a little bit of the right information, at the right place, at the right time and in the right context than having all the information in the world six months after the fact.” This followed 3 customer examples doing TIBCO-based CEP (a “Western states utility”, a “major Asian bank”, and a “major Indian mobile company” -  covering energy, finance and telco industries).
• On EDA: “[T]here’s going to be a systematic shift from transactional to event driven architectures … transactions don’t pickup threats and opportunities … there is a systematic shift, it’s like a change that’s taking place …”
• On BPM: “We’ve seen a number of situations where a customer actually went away from say an ERP CRM type implementation as in the case of the Asian bank and went through an event driven inbound marketing approach.”
• On BI: “The traditional BI players are largely reporting systems … they allow you to analyze and mine data after the fact and what we do is we look at streaming events before and allow you to anticipate what’s going to happen as it is about to happen. Then, we also with our Spotfire product have taken the visualization of it through a whole different level. I think those are the two elements, the predictive real time nature versus the reporting after the fact nature and the visual technology that goes with it.”

This week FOX Business News interviewed TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadive on “IT spending around the world”. Vivek mentioned 2 TIBCO technology use cases that were investing to “grow the business” not just save costs - 2 TIBCO Complex Event Processing technology users, as it happens…

• Reliance in India avoiding customer churn by making simple, event-based decisions that directly improve the customer experience
• A “large Asian bank” making event-based decisions to successfully encourage customers to spend more money on their services.

Vivek, who was in New York to speak to the Waters Conference about the IT needs of financial institutions, also made a great quip “if you’re not real time you’re history“. Sounds like he also managed to fit in a sales discussion with another CEO at the news station that day!