… asks analyst Mike Gualtieri (co-author of the recent Forrester CEP Wave) in a recent twitter. Luckily for Mike he doesn’t have to look too far to find an answer (as presumably this is covered in his own CEP Wave report)… TIBCO BusinessEvents provides exactly that! 
PS: just *how* exactly do people find time to twitter?
Dr John Bates of Apama, cofounder of one of the earliest vendors in the CEP space, gave a very nice keynote presentation at DEBS. Apama’s view on CEP market trends include things like location-aware telco services such as real-time dating (!), transport and logistics, etc. In particular John predicted:
One automatically respects speakers when they politely reference their industry competitors - for example John gave due credit to TIBCO for pushing event processing in market areas beyond Capital Markets, as well as rule-engine-based event processing. And there was nothing in John’s presentation we could disagree (much) with. Except maybe the need for that CEP-driven dating thing…
[Disclaimer: Apama is a competitor to TIBCO BusinessEvents in the CEP market].
The Banker runs annual technology awards, and this year the Citibank CEP application supporting real-time marketing is one of the winners. The article quotes:
“The system deploys complex event processing technology to evaluate static and dynamic events against a customer profile and ‘propensity model’, to determine in real time the next best offer the bank can extend to the customer.”
“Because the system operates on a ‘rules basis’, it can be adapted by business users to design the rules that govern a particular campaign without the involvement of IT staff. “
“The bank is also using the intelligence in the system for fraud prevention and proactive customer service.”
One of the interesting attributes of rule-based systems (whether in complex event processing, decision services, or whatever) is the ability for end-users to maintain the rules separately from the IT development cycle. Rule-based development tools (TIBCO BusinessEvents included) typically allow for the hot-deployment of these changes - usually where process instances are updated with the new application logic in between transactions or events. This update process is both inevitable and a requirement when the underlying ontology or Business Object Model changes.
There is however a class of update that is less obtrusive, and can be managed simply by a rule update event. This is where the rule design pattern (or template) does not change, but the change is a create / update / delete operation on such a pattern instance, stored as an object or concept. Alternatively the update could simply be to rule instance metadata (for example, champion-challenger status, or active status, or effective date). In an Event-Driven Decision system, such update events are simply a new type of event to be processed, and would typically be created by some suitable Business User Interface (or automatically generated by some analytics system). Of course, rule maintenance events themselves should be validated by the rule engine prior to deployment, and other controls such as security and authentication may be required.
Of course, with event-driven rule maintenance one has to decide where the *record* of the current rule instances is to be stored - either in running rule system (for example, exploiting the distributed cache), or local to the user interface. Alternatively one can resort to tradition, treat the rule instances as data in a database, and update them via a simple 2-tier UI using database-imported concepts in the rule-based system…
