Jun
15
2010
OMG Event Processing Consortium Symposium webinars
Posted by Paul Vincent
Brenda Michelson announced that the OMG EPCS webinars are up on the web: register here for access links. Presentations included:
- Gartner’s Roy Schulte on “The Time for Event Processing is Now” (a pun on the fact that the time for event processing is always now, otherwise we are doing historic (data) processing…)
- Roy introduced the concept of being “event-driven”, and CEP leading to “situation awareness”. Roy’s version of what we call the “event - decision - action” model is the “event - compute+analyse+decide - response” model - of course these are equivalent with some fuzziness between the event and the decision…
- Conventional (transactional system) reports and BI are not event driven, and suffer from too much “business latency” - problems are detected after they occur rather than as they occur, leading to fewer opportunities for intervention.
- Roy’s CEP patterns included:
- the “operations or process monitor” (a.k.a situation awareness in the business operations and processes)
- the “supply chain management monitoring” (a subclass of the above)
- the “enterprise nervous systems” such as monitoring airline operations or large railroads
- The EP Market viewed “continuous intelligence” applications often using custom CEP apps is >$10B in 2009, with the BAM and CEP tool market being $189M in 2009 with likely growth of 30-40% pa.
- Chris Bird at SABRE showed an “Event Distribution Architecture” case study, referencing the book and analyst methodology “Lost in Translation” that is based on policies, events and content.
- Events are not necessarily about “real time” behavior, but responding as required. The “content” is the information related to the event, and issues include “how to avoid gumming up the works”… so the “enterprise pattern” is to define events, interested parties, information and security models… leading to a “policy event content” framework.
- On events, Chris assumes separate content and control channel to coordinate (transactional?) event processing, with a “policy engine” monitoring the control channel.
- Chris’ explanation of his view on event processing seemed definitely about coordinating “event transactions”, talking about “message failures” and the suchlike.
- Content structures could be XML, legacy formats, or some canonical form - Chris proposed sending both old formats and new canonical forms, or possibly transforming the event in a “staging processor” and republishing for other processing agents, giving much flexibility.
- Chris’ key points were to concentrate on event distribution, not event processing, and loose coupling was better than tight schemas…
- Opher Etzion of IBM Research presented on the next 7 years in event processing
- Trend 1 was from narrow to wide focus applications, beyond the current domains to robotics, home automation etc… although to be fair most of the embedded systems guys already do lots of event-driven state modelling in their systems.
- Trend 2 is from monolithic to diversified systems.
- Trend 3 is from proprietary to standardised, for example in languages allowing for interoperability.
- Trend 4 is programmer-centric to semi-technical centric - hence modelling, high level languages like event pattern languages, and so on.
- Trend 5 is from standalone packaged applications to embedded components.
- Trend 6 is from reactive to proactive.
- Directions are that multiple types of platform are moving to a virtual event processing platform, a movement to tailor-made optimisations within event processing,and event processing software engineering.
Overall some interesting points made in these presentations, and the event was an interesting alternative to the more academic DEBS and Dagstuhls this year.
[Disclaimer: TIBCO presented too. I'll leave the commentary on that to other folks!]
[Update: removed one review due to author objections!]
Tags: OMG EP Consortium
Complex Event Processing (CEP), Meetings and events | 15 June 2010 |
6 Comments
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By Colin Clark, July 9, 2010 @ 10:34
Paul,
You left out the CEP part of what we do, which is very unique in terms of the current set of offerings in the market today. But thanks for the mention, we appreciate it.
Colin
By Paul Vincent, July 12, 2010 @ 00:00
Hi Colin - hopefully readers will have inferred that your presenting at an event processing symposium meant you did indeed do “CEP”! And good luck with the cloud approach.
Cheers
By Colin Clark, July 12, 2010 @ 08:04
Paul,
I think if you’re going act as a reporter covering an event, that you should do so impartially. Chris’s presentation, for example, focused on event delivery - not CEP; ours was entirely focused upon CEP:
We’re the first vendor to do CEP in the cloud,
we’re the first vendor integrating streaming map/reduce & CEP, and
I demonstrated (as much as a pre-recorded event would allow), real time computational linguistics and CEP, another first (and copied by StreamBase for the World Cup)
I didn’t comment upon your presentation because Tibco and Cloud Event Processing are currently competing for opportunities.
So I would respectfully ask that, if you’re going to cover other vendors’ presentations, that you do so diligently. Attempting to create a veil of objectivity by not commenting on your presentation is as logically flawed as leaving your readers to ‘assume’ that our presentation was about CEP.
If I ever decide to cover your work, I’ll be sure to do the same.
Respectfully,
Colin
By Paul Vincent, July 12, 2010 @ 13:44
Hi Colin - methinks you dost complain too much… either that or maybe you are trying to be deliberately controversial here as some kind of marketing campaign?
To set the record straight: I did not report more on your presentation as it came across to me as more a vendor presentation in an arena that was (AFAIK) meant to be vendor neutral - but instead of criticising it I thought it best to just make a minor description of some of the content in case anyone might be interested in following it up…
But as you now raise a few interesting points… We’re the first vendor to do CEP in the cloud, Maybe. Maybe not. Any proof of this? For example I know a colleague was running TIBCO CEP as a cloud service a year or so ago, but maybe you have some production deployments and some independent market research to give some credence to this quote. Regardless, I offered you good luck with this cloud strategy in a previous comment… oh well.
I didn’t comment upon your presentation because Tibco and Cloud Event Processing are currently competing for opportunities. Well, I am not surprised that both you and TIBCO are “looking for opportunities”, but I might be surprised that we would be in any competitive situations. I am more surprised that you should respond in such a way here on TIBCO’s CEP blog! Note that both your and mine were public presentations at this event.
So I would respectfully ask that, if you’re going to cover other vendors’ presentations, that you do so diligently. Attempting to create a veil of objectivity by not commenting on your presentation is as logically flawed as leaving your readers to ‘assume’ that our presentation was about CEP.It seems you misunderstood my comments? Firstly you are assuming that I was covering a vendor presentation - see my point above, this event was explicitly meant to not be vendor presentations. Secondly, why would reviews cover all details of your presentation? Thirdly, as I intimated in my original reply, I would have thought it obvious that you were covering something to do with CEP as this was an event processing event (and yes, Chris’ presentation was relevant to event processing systems too).
If I ever decide to cover your work, I’ll be sure to do the same.
, and objective criticisms preferred.
You are of course free to make whatever comments you like on your blog. Within legal bounds of course
Cheers
By Colin Clark, July 12, 2010 @ 15:20
Paul,
A couple of points and then I think this horse is dead:
1) I wasn’t aware of any restrictions on whether or not the presentations where meant to be vendor specific or not. I demonstrated the pieces that we used to build a topical and relevant demonstration of CEP running in the cloud. That’s what we were asked to do. That’s what we did.
2) I should have been more clear - we’re the first CEP product/service designed specifically for the cloud. Running software as a service, accessible via the internet, does not qualify for ‘designed for the cloud’ in our book.
3) Yes, we’re in competitive situations. That’s why I was surprised to see the comment that I’ve highlighted in #4 (below).
4) You did cover a vendor’s presentation - ours. And your comments above began with, “which was interesting but not unique enough to warrant mention here.” I find that comment inappropriate without justification.
In regards to your comments regarding, “trying to be deliberately controversial here as some kind of marketing campaign?” if Tibco, or any other company in this space, is going to comment on our company, our products, our services or our customers, then you can surely expect to hear our side of it.
Respectfully,
Colin
By Paul Vincent, July 13, 2010 @ 02:59
Hi Colin - interesting. I generally don’t comment on vendor-specific pitches unless (a) in a public forum and (b) there were either some debatable assertions or points I thought worth expanding on. So as you clearly gave what we both agree was a “vendor presentation”, I moved my comment on your session (even if IMHO it was pretty inoccuous) from the blog post to here in the comments (and I repeat it here only for context).
So what did I say?
Colin Clark covered “Identifying Threats & Opportunities in Social Networks” via map reduce in cloud processing of events. This seemed to start with a bit of a product pitch - which was interesting but not unique enough to warrant mention here
* The map reduce approach was explained as “streaming” i.e. without saving to disk.
* Colin described an application design for analyzing tweets for Nasdaq symbols representing sentiment towards any particular stock.
Your objection was
“which was interesting but not unique enough to warrant mention here.” I find that comment inappropriate without justification”.
But this comment was simply because some of what you were pitching was common and general across CEP technologies, and the rest pure marketing. I am not going to repeat or comment on other vendor product pitches on this blog (unless requested!).
Good indicators that “product pitches are inappropriate” would be:
1. The call for presentations has wording like “Please note, submissions that are direct pitches for product or services will not be considered”. This was the wording sent to me for this event. Sounds like you didn’t get the same message.
2. The event sponsors are not presenting - they paid money for the event so you would expect them to get first billing to submit any pitch. This was not the case here - IBM and Starview sponsored, and of these just IBM presented - and Opher’s presentation was anything BUT a product pitch!
3. There are no other product pitches. For example I’m pretty sure I made it clear I was from a vendor, but it was not a “product pitch” per se. And I would consider it perfectly valid for other vendors to publicly blog on the pattern-decision-reaction pattern I talked about, if they so wanted…
As you said, this horse is flogged - points made and positions understood.
Cheers