Forrester’s James Kobelius made some interesting comments on the proposed buy-out of IDS Scheer - known for their high level process modeling tool Aris - by SoftwareAG. Such as:

“What’s most exciting, and potentially differentiating, about the Software AG/IDS Scheer BI portfolio is the combination of CEP with mashup and an in-memory architecture to support truly real-time, interactive analytics. In other words, Software AG/IDS Scheer could take a page out of the book of another SOA full-stack vendor: TIBCO and its Spotfire product group. “

Unfortunately the IDS Scheer BAM solution (which does not claim to be a Complex Event Processing solution) is OEMed - making full integration and exploitation more difficult. Otherwise, we agree, this could have had some potential to catch up with TIBCO.

Possibly more interesting to the event processing community is IDS’ alternative to value chain models - their event-driven process chain. Mostly this has been replaced by BPMN diagramming in modern process modeling environments, but nonetheless could still provide a useful high-level notation… perhaps SoftwareAG will propose it as a standard somewhere?

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:

• the rise of event-driven business rules, tracking anything on the planet
• federated services and the agile “enterprise nervous system”, including event rules in the cloud(s), in IT Architecture
• the demise of the specialist “EP”/”CEP” market with its replacement by “Event Driven BPM” covering rules, events and BPM as well as industry apps embedding event processing.

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].

Tibco’s Jacky Yap has posted a nice YouTube video of CEP-BPM-SOA interaction. Enjoy!

And with that, TIBCO’s newest offering, Silver is off and running. 

Announced yesterday at the NOWonline show, it seems to be getting a good bit of attention in the press, analyst and blogosphere communities.  eBizQ picked up on the announcement and commented on its use of CEP in the automation of cloud-app-balancing. As for me, my head is a bit cloudy at the moment, from all the fuss.

So what is Silver, and what does it have to do with CEP? 

Everything. 

TIBCO Silver is new software infrastructure for “cloud” computing.  A “Silver” lining for the clouds you might say. 

And why is this important for CEP? 

Because it’s an infrastructure product that embeds a CEP engine in order to solve problems related to governance (managed access, security, privacy and adherence to regulations), and scalability (uses SLAs to automatically scale up / or down as needed).  The kicker is that it’s automatic, so both the governance and the scaling is accomplished inherently through embedded monitoring, management and event-decision-action rules rather than manual intervention and programming -which AFAIK, is an achilles heel for current cloud products being introduced. 

This should be an interesting announcement for developers of different types of Business2Consumer or Consumer2Consumer apps that are likely to vary widely in resource requirements. The embedded governance allows for various levels of authorization, authentication and encryption policies to be dynamically configured. This is important because some services should be open to everyone and some services, well, just shouldn’t.

As in most cloud architectures, and not counting those who simply put the cloud moniker in front of their latest software product, there is no software to install or hardware to procure or provision, which reduces the barrier to develop and deploy rapid IT solutions (whether that’s infrastructure, platform or applications)

TIBCO Silver is currently in Beta. It will be interesting to see the deployments when they start rolling out.

Traditionally (i.e. for the past 2-3 years!) CEP has mainly been covered by the (mostly academic) DEBS event [3rd is this year in Nashville, July 6-9] and the EPTS Symposium [5th is this year in Trento Italy, Sept 21-23]. Interestingly there is increasing spin-off of CEP into other events - such as (interesting for rule-driven CEP tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents) the Business Rules Forum [12th this year in Vegas - presumably as an antidote to this year's economic news - Nov 1-5]. BRForum has acknowledged 2 very-CEP-related agenda entries by 2 very-respected-experts:

Event Processing 2010: Past, Present and Future
David Luckham, Emeritus Professor, Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

This tutorial on Complex Event Processing (CEP) will cover six topics.
1. Developing markets for event processing - a short survey of the growth of CEP in enterprise management applications and Business Activity Monitoring.
2. History. - Event processing 1950 ─ 2000.
3. Adopting event processing — how to analyze your event processing requirements and plan a solution.
4. A survey of basic CEP concepts and their applications.
5. Crossing the Chasms - the four stages in the development of event processing from 2000 to 2050. The need to improve the CEP technology in commercial tools and applications.
6. The age of ubiquitous CEP - event processing goes global and disappears under the hood. Scenarios of current and future applications.
What you will learn:
• What Complex Event Processing is
• How to apply CEP to solve business problems and improve your BI operations
• How CEP enhances Service Oriented Architectures, Business Process Management, and Business Rules systems

A Facilitated Peer-to-Peer Workshop: Semantic Processes, Services and Events
Paul Haley, Founder, Automata, Inc.

Semantic technology provides the most general and flexible form of data modeling along with logical and rule-based capabilities. A new wave of semantic tools and standards, including models of time, events, and processes promise to align enterprise data modeling, application development, service-oriented architecture and business process management more closely with the perspectives of knowledge management and business rules practitioners.
What we will discuss:
• How semantic standards extend model-driven architecture to knowledge management
• How semantic architectures and models unify SOA and BPM, including events
• How semantics increases the impact of business intelligence and activity monitoring
• How BPMN, SBVR, PRR and complex event processing do or don’t intersect

Just the week before BRForum there is the rule-developer-focused October Rule Fest (which I keep wanting to write as Oktober Rule Fest, for some reason) [in Dallas, Oct 26-30] which, apart from a fascinating agenda for rule IT folk, has CEP topics such as:

Early Alert System at Southwest Airlines
Greg Barton: Southwest Airlines, Senior Software Engineer

Southwest Airlines is venturing into the rules development space with the Early Alert System. EAS enables SWA to have a real-time model of it’s entire aircraft fleet, tracking such activities as taxi in, taxi out, and in gate turn. It does this by maintaining a data structure representing physical assets and the activities they perform. Incoming data from those assets update the data structure, and rules react to the changes. We hope to use this paradigm going forward to use rules to monitor other aspects of the enterprise, enabling a more agile and efficient response to the airline’s daily operating challenges. Our main points will be the Overview, Feature Review, Design, Other Uses of Rules at present by SWA and the future of rules at SWA. [Note: this is a TIBCO CEP application in production at SWA]

ET2: Temporal Reasoning: a requirement for CEP
Edson Tirelli: Drools, CEP Designer

As Complex Event Processing grows in popularity and applicability, the convergence between modeling paradigms demand more and more functional requirements from the available tools. One key requirement for CEP use cases (and standard business scenarios) is the ability to write rules and queries that require some degree of temporal awareness, from simple constraints to actual data inference. More than that, temporal reasoning is a feature on top of which the actual platform can leverage internal optimizations, aiming for resource savings and improved scalability. [Note: DROOLS has now become the 2nd CEP inference engine]

A Survey of Complex-Event Processing Models
Charles Young: Solid Soft, Principal Consultant

Prof. David Luckham defined an EPN (Event Processing Network) as a network of ‘lightweight rules engines’ which act as Event Processing Agents (EPAs). He contrasted this with the exploitation of rules-based inference engines as ‘heavyweight EPAs’. Complex-event processing (CEP) is inherently rule-based and centres on pattern matching based, in large part, on temporal constraints. CEP, today, is broadly characterised by the use of diverse processing models embodied within different technologies. What are these models? What are their major differentiators, strengths and weaknesses, and how do they compare with Rete engines and other rules processing approaches? Are some models truly more ‘lightweight’ or ‘heavyweight’? What are the underlying differences and similarities and how might each approach best be exploited in building scalable and agile EPNs?

Still to be announced is the RuleML09 event’s agenda [conveniently co-located with BRForum, Nov 5-7] and targeting the rule representation community… we’ll have to wait and see if CEP gets represented here too!

Disclaimer: TIBCO is presenting at BRF and ORF on rule-CEP topics, too.