TIBCO’s presentation at BRForum, an event dominated by multiple flavors of “business rule engine” vendors, was not meant to be provocative but simply to explain some of the benefits of Complex Event Processing / event-based views on “business rules” from both the business analysis perspective and the rule execution perspective. However, it also seemed quite timely given the conference analyst presentations expounding the benefits of CEP for business rule processing. It was also timely given the CEP coverage at last week’s ORF, and recent blog postings on the benefits or otherwise of inferencing (/ Rete rule processing).

The basic premise is: for “business rule” declarations, associating the applicable events helps understand how such rules can be enforced. And once those rules are mapped into production rules or decision models, the same event-to-rule mapping makes execution both simpler and easier to update. Lesson over.

Unfortunately, my smugness at presenting this supposed “revelation” for BRForum attendees was short-lived. Later in the conference, consultant Brian Dickinson expounded on how putting “process silos” between “events” and “rules” was nothing more than a bad practice dating from the pre-IT age, when instead we should be modeling event contexts and bypassing the need to store data at “every step”. And later, decision-table guru Prof Jan Vanthienen explained how business process diagrams were nothing more than a visualization of a set of rules - and quite often a redundent onewhen used  in business automation cases, where applying rules directly to events was a much more efficient representation…

For a less biased view of the presentation check out Sandy Kemsley and Eric Charpentier’s blog posts…

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…

Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri presented on his view of the Complex Event Processing space versus the BRE space - Mike is co-author of both the BRE and CEP Forrester reports. So, going into this, the audience were wondering: is Mike going to say “keep them separate - they are tackling different problems”? Or “they are doing much the same thing - combine them”?

Mike gave a simplistic version of the differences between BREs and CEP engines: CEP handling multiple event channels for input and output, and using (mostly) different algorithms. Mike used the term “event handlers” for the equivalent to BRE rulesets (roughly equivalent to EPTS‘ Event Processing Elements). as well as the term “temporal cache” for CEP event stores. He also coined the term “Event Processing Architecture” to describe CEP-based architectures and event processing networks. Although I quite like some of this terminology, Mike was called out by the audience for his use of some terms - for example comparing CEP with “Business Rules” (when he meant “Business Rule Engines”, and would have been even more accurate if he just said data-driven rule engines…). He was also called out by the audience when he claimed no BREs had temporal constructs for the example he showed (which was recognisable as an example from a mostly-financial-services CEP vendor)  - when a few do…

Also mentioned were 2 examples of where CEP and BRE technology are already being combined - including TIBCO BusinessEvents (described as “poaching from the BRE market”, although I prefer to think the customer base is just becoming better educated… ), and the open source Drools offering (described as a BRE introducing some CEP features).

Mike ended with his comment that real-time / temporal business rules / decisions should all be processed on a single platform, not on separate CEP and BRE platforms. Which of course is what TIBCO does today - so kudos to Mike for calling this out at a BRE conference.

As a side note I see the parallel session by Gartner’s Jim Sinur (on BRManagement as a partner to Process) also mentioned how “rules technology was being included in CEP”…

Business Rules Forum this week, and the keynote was Gartner’s Jim Sinur talking about business patterns - and how businesses needed to identify and recognise such patterns to drive processes and decisions. Apparently this topic was a big hit at a recent Gartner conference. So one of Jim’s slides shows a bunch of “data points” and how one needs to find “patterns” in the data points… which was beginning to look familiar to those who have watched TIBCO presentations on CEP!

Being a Gartner analyst, Jim naturally had to attempt a classification of these “information patterns” - and indeed presented a chart with axes for innovation versus risk and strategic versus operational - which probably means this has to go through at least one more interation (as I’m sure most CFO’s will classify innovation *as* a risk!).

Jim mentioned the “pattern seeking technologies”  as predictive analytics, social media, information media / middleware,  Complex Event Processing, and “intelligent decision” platforms. In his view businesses will need to move to these from the current technologies like BPM. In reality of course such patterns will simply be fed *into* existing business processes…

Finally, Jim described his view on the evolution path for “pattern-capable” business software, as a type of business tecnology maturity model, from BPM +events +BAM +BI to rules, goals, and MDM and thence to collaborative and social software.

The bottom line: information and event pattern detection is key for agile businesses. And CEP is a mainstream technology providing these detection capabilities…