Having sufficiently had a chance to recover from a very busy and very engaging TUCON TIBCO 2010 user conference in Las Vegas, I wanted to pass along a few observations and notes from my track this year which was the Optimization and Visibility track.  This was a very full 2 days of mostly CEP customer presentations with a smattering of industry IT analysts and TIBCO engineering presentations thrown in for good measure.

I’ll include this as a series and cover one presentation at a time.

First up is PepsiCo, co-presented with their implementation partner, Infosys.

The use case was how PepsiCo uses CEP software to provide more efficient and cost-effective usage of their company transportation fleet and other dedicated transportation partners.

In specific, they wanted to use their CEP software to provide advice on when to use their own transportation fleet, or use another carrier for consumer product shipments all over the U.S.  Previously, Pepsi was using a manual, labor intensive process to manage the process.

In researching this project it was decided that they needed to be able to dynamically deploy their policies (or business rules), and automatically create decision trees to reflect the changing dynamics and costs of the transportation industry, they needed real time information on truck locations and cost valuations, and to capture metrics for performance measurement.

They also covered the architecture and design of their deployed system which was implemented with the Pepsi IT team and Infosys.  He explained how they were able to develop simple and timed events to automate and manage the business rules with the TIBCO rule authoring tool, deploy customized and re-usable processes to extract data from a 3rd Party tool at regular intervals and provide enhanced performance by querying large amount of data as subsets and utilizing XSL and XPATH capabilities within the TIBCO software.

They also wanted to provide the ability to correlate events or create alerts based on events. He described it as “managing their company transportation events”

Example: If xx# errors occur in an hour, then send email to baseline support.

Example: If the Dedicated Fleet carrier has not reviewed their trip within 2 hours of offering, alert the Network Coordinator.

They also covered their business benefits– which included the ability to strategically identify the placement of dedicated and company fleet capacity, scale their fleet best practices nationally, and provide an agile software platform that gives them the flexibility to adapt to change via business rules that require minimum to no code change.

Key learnings from their project included his observation that they were glad they involved the business side early in the project in defining business rules, actions and data elements. PepsiCo also chose to build this CEP solution using iterative methodology principles to in order to keep the business side engaged throughout the project, specifically in the area of User Interface and Rule Authoring.

One of the speakers also covered ROI and payback– but we were sworn to secrecy.

In general, it was a well received presentation by the packed room.

But what I really liked about this particular session was that it presented by the guys who were directly involved and it was to Infosys’ credit that they let the Pepsi guys (and the project’s) success speak for itself.

CEP applications are often touted as to be so cutting edge and revolutionary, but it’s applications such as these “bread and butter” projects that seems to have made a difference in their everyday company operations and sometimes it’s those applications that turn out to be the most important of all.

More customer presentations later …

I think Alan is planning to post up a review of the TUCON 2010 CEP track sessions that he was busy managing last week in Vegas. So I’ll limit this post to some links to some of the reviews and pointing out the other CEP-related sessions …

Brenda Michelson, who has long covered the EDA space, posted some reviews on:

• the Analyst Day which included CEP customer Energy Australia and their SmartGrid project
• OOCL and their Shipping Container Track and Trace application, using CEP for primarily exception management - this was very interesting as they went from a Java app, to BPEL (partial implementation), to a TIBCO BusinessEvents solution. So the ROI and business value of the CEP approach over a BPEL implementation, in this case, seems pretty clear. Note that many other business processes, though, have been successfully implemented using BPEL at OOCL.
• PepsiCo and real-time decision support, co-presented by Infosys, using primarily the TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager feature to standardise enforcement of shipping selection business rules at Pepsi Co.

ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett covered the analyst day too, and included remarks on CEP-user Xcel Energy’s smartgrid project as part of his summary. He also analysed the TIBCO CEO’s supposedly-controversial positioning of “Enterprise 3.0″…

Ovum’s Tony Baer was also unimpressed on “Enterprise 3.0″ but did comment on the potential of text processing by Netrics in CEP (although later he complains about the lack of data quality solutions in TIBCO MDM - which AFAIK is actually the main role for Netrics being in the TIBCO product family!).

A number of other TIBCO CEP customers were busy in other tracks that ran in parallel to the main CEP “Business Optimization” track. So no-one could cover all the CEP sessions!

• Accenture talked about Vodafone’s Strategic Order Management - …how Vodafone UK transformed its IT infrastructure to become a leading provider of total communications. … their strategic solution for Order Management, Product Catalogue and Service Delivery, which includes business process management, master data management and event processing technologies.
• EnergyAustralia also gave a session as well as talking to the analysts - …evolved from implementing simple integration projects to a full-fledged event-driven SOA environment, … monitoring real-time information from complex event patterns.
• HP and TIBCO covered Cyber Security - …real-time decision support has become increasingly critical to enterprise operations, establishing relationships between disparate events and the flood of seemingly unrelated data has often complicated cyber security solution development. … demonstrate, live, a jointly developed cyber security solution based on complex event processing and closed-loop systems analysis. This approach not only thwarts cyber attacks, it enables you to create actionable intelligence, specific courses of action, and situational awareness, culminating in rapid decision-making and attack mitigation.
• Swisscom talked about Business Transformation, together with TMNS, using the TIBCO Advanced Fulfillment Framework that embeds CEP - ...integration, business processes, data model-driven transformation, monitoring, and exception handling in complex environments.
• I also noticed that 4 of the 6 customer BPM sessions were by customers who also use TIBCO CEP technology in conjunction with BPM.

I think the above is a pretty decent turnout for CEP customers. Perhaps TUCON should be renamed “The Event Processing Show” next year!

Dr. Sumit Chowdhury, CIO of Reliance Communications, was another keynote presenter and CEP user at TUCON this year. Reliance is one of the biggest telco operators in the world operating mostly in Asia.

Sumit viewed the evolution of organisations as being matched by their core IT approaches: moving from simple to complex in organisation (and this mostly diven by size) being relected in their IT evolution from historic -to- responsive -to- predictive -to- analytic. To explain this, Sumit compared business organisations with organisms, with stimuli resulting in reflex operations or, for more difficult stimuli, to the brain. The IT equivalent is that typically transactions are treated by preprogrammed, reflexive, business systems… but where analytics lead to more intelligence leading to more evolved “reflex actions”…

Reliance handle 330k channel payments per day and deal with 1M calls per day, collecting events such as “phone recharge orders”. As these transactions occur too fast to rely on getting the full history (ie context) for customers in an on-line database transaction, they prime their CEP system with historic customer infomation, allowing them to enable policies like “for every 4th phone recharge by a customer, reward with a free 30mins calltime”. Effectively the state of the customer is managed in TIBCO BusinessEvents state machines, and they exploit declarative rules which are easier to change via a dashboard.

Sumit ended with some key requirements for successful business solutions:

1. business control (e.g. ready adjustment of business rules, policies and decisions)
2. scalability for business growth (e.g. ability to re-architect for multiples improvement in throughput)
3. context-aware (e.g. access to any necessary metadata and history for decision making)
4. real time (e.g. making decisions in the timescale required by the customer - “customer time”)

This was an excellent keynote - covering aspects of business philosophy as well as technology trends. Reliance have been using TIBCO BusinessEvents for eXtreme Transaction Processing type applications for a while and have been instrumental in some of the scalability enhancements in past releases.

Jan Marshall, VP of Technology and CIO, Southwest Airlines presented on the Southwest philosophy - employees first and customer focus - that has led it become the today’s largest US airline (#flights) with a reputation for being THE golden standard for employee relations (yet interestingly the most heavily unionised too). Its not a coincidence therefore that they have been profitable for the past 36 yrs, have the lowest number of customer complaints, have never had layoffs… I liked the philosophy of “Employees 1st - leads to happy employees - leads to happy customers - leads to happy shareholders”. I also smiled at the fact that they don’t have all (rigidly enforced) “business rules”, but “business guidelines” that are overridable by employees as required!

As part of their “customer first” approach SouthWest are always looking to improve the customer experience - and improving airline operations using CEP (through TIBCO BusinessEvents) to provide decision support for gate operations is one such application.

Jan made one particularly interesting comment: the seams between customer service and operations were blurring — in other words customer events affect operations and allow them to adapt to improve customer experience…

Another interesting TIBCO BusinessEvents customer keynote - although I expect Jan was a little nervous of saying too much in front of the high number of other airlines in the TUCON audience! Another interesting observation by Jan was they they consider their Operations app to be part of the first wave of CEP apps in their business.

José Luís Prola Salinas, SVP of Technology and Logistics at Banco do Brasil, gave another CEP-related keynote at TUCON this year. Banco do Brasil is one of the financial success stories in the recent financial recession - profits up 100% between 2007 and 2009, for example - and is the leading Latin America bank in terms of assets, with 52+M clients across 23 countries, doing >1Bn transactions every month (~93% automated), utilising 139K MIPS of IT computer resource!

Banco do Brasil recognised they had a problem which José described as “rearview mirror syndrome” - they knew that looking only at data from the past could catch them out in future. To solve this they started classifying their application tasks by “criticality” and started moving these to real-time event processing using TIBCO BusinessEvents - tasks like the transactional generation of active marketing offers. Their key requirements were:

• multi channel - internet, phone etc using geo location etc event data
• real-time - need to respond to events as they occur, not after the event is stale

Business benefits were described as: convenience, productivity, inclusion (event-driven applications can affect 200M people - customers and their families), integration and consistency across channels, sustainability (and maintainability), and borderless operations.

This was a good business-level keynote although obviously didn’t go into technical detail - I thought the classification of applications at the architecture level was an interesting approach, whereas at the event modelling / technical level we might do such a classification at the business event level, for example to classify use case importance,