My colleague, Paul, got lots of… let’s call it, “feedback” regarding his post on the impending demise of the standalone Business Rule Engine (BRE) Market. It seems there are lots of folks out there who feel quite passionate about the subject, so I thought I would continue, albeit from a different angle and relate it back to the CEP and BusinessEvents for comparison.

So… taking my cue from David Letterman and with a tip o’ the hat to Paul, here are the:

Top 10 reasons why TIBCO BusinessEvents (BE) beats a simple Business Rule Engine + JMS layer (remember, no wagering please)

10. BE is Standards-based (for concept/class models, state models, rule models etc)

9. BE requires no app server or RDBMS (for lower cost, and quicker deployment)

8. BE provides multiple options to extend to other event channel types (for flexible complex event processing)

7. BE has Rule / decision management (for business control of software services)

6. BE takes a co-operative agent approach (for co-operating components and event processing services)

5. BE supports high scalability (for parallelizing applications and eXtreme Transaction Processing)

4. BE supports queries as well as rules (for dynamic facts)

3. BE supports State Models as well as rules (for case management, entity lifecycles, etc)

2. BE is designed as a stateful approach (for saving temporal information between messages)

and the number 1 reason is…

1. Real-time event-driven support already built in to the BE rule engine (for efficient Event-Driven Architecture use)

Well here’s an interesting post from someone at PWC consulting.

http://www.pwc.com/extweb/home.nsf/docid/FB2EF3AC6E351ECC8525746B00676021

The way he’s presenting it, he appears to have seen the beginnings of an IT nirvana by linking business intelligence, rules and process management together to create a whole new “intelligent business process platform”, although it takes a “heroic effort” - no doubt through extensive services.

He also says that “enterprises that create value through rapid process changes are beginning to define a market opportunity for a preintegrated suite of tools that supports intelligent business performance management.”

I think he’s onto something there. Call us, PWC. We’ll talk.

He also found and interviews someone in SAP to explain how they will be framing these categories as applications that people will adopt similar to the ERP adoption pattern.

Hmmm….

For the former, this begs the question, is BPM a ready made problem for CEP to solve? Or vice versa?

For the SAP position, well… nah, I’m not gonna comment on that one. SAP provides too many customers to companies like TIBCO to solve / and or augment their ERP systems.

What do you think?

As I write the last of my event summary reports and follow up action items, I am now officially putting a bow on the TIBCO user conference (TUCON 2008)

What a madhouse. I was accountable for the TIBCO Analyst Summit (TIBCO’s first ever), two days of the Business Optimization track of presentations (combining engineering, customer and analyst presentations) and ensuring that TIBCO CEP BusinessEventsTM booth was staffed and overflowing with interested folks. Add in various podcasts and spokesperson duties for press and customers and it all equaled a stressful, crazed and wholly satisfying event at the same time, if that’s possible.

I met some great folks from all over the world: partners, analysts, customers - in particular, Southwest Airlines and Allstate Insurance – knowledgeable and fine folks in all respects, really pushing the edge of what is possible in IT and event processing.

What I experienced at the conference relative to CEP, was this. It appears that the mainstream messaging, integration and SOA folks are finally getting it and see the value in event driven SOA and are asking for CEP and BusinessEventsTM by name. There is also a groundswell of interest in Business Optimization and some analysts like IDC and other sundry vendors are seeing Business Optimization as the next big thing.

And they’re right. Booyah!.

Quite a few nice posts ended up in the blogosphere that comment on TUCON, SOA, CEP et al – , Sandy Kemsley, Joe McKendrick, Dana Gardner, Tony Baer among others with interesting perspectives.

However, my biggest AHA moment was the realization in listening to our other customers, besides Southwest and Allstate, that some of the greatest applications of CEP are not the big and noticeable “complex” events that marketing folks like to talk about. They are instead using TIBCO BusinessEvents much more low key and pragmatically, like making sure their customers are less irritated or their business can recover quicker from unforeseen circumstances.

I’ll quote my colleague Chris M. when he says “it opens BusinessEvents up to solving common everyday problems which should be easy to do, but for some reason are hard (e.g. Baggage Handling).”

For many of our customers, it’s not overly visible, but it works for them.

And that’s what really matters.

Here’s a sure sign that a technology three letter acronym (CEP) is hitting its stride - someone draws a cartoon lampooning it. Geek and Poke’s Oliver Widdel created this one.

http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2008/02/minigeek—ed5.html

Take a look for yourself. It reminds me of the saying that went around when I was working for some AI / Business Rule companies.

“Which one’s better - Artificial Intelligence or Real Stupidity”

A couple of days ago Paul suggested politely that consultants working for some of the smaller niche CEP (mostly ESP) vendors might want to consider a career at TIBCO’s expanding CEP practice.

Since then, all h3LL seems to have broken loose. 

First we had Oracle announcing its takeover of BEA. Then a few days later, IBM goes and buys Aptsoft, and by virtue of buying a small CEP vendor, some of the big cheeses from the IBM Websphere division are now feeling empowered and are trying to rename CEP to BEP ( Business Event Processing ).

What an exciting world we live in!

So we hereby duly extend the invitation to any CEP professionals who may have recently joined BEA with the idea of working on their OEM’ed stream processing platform or Aptsoft with their newly branded "BEP" tool. This includes developers, too, (you know who you are.) 

As Paul relayed in his latest blog, TIBCO has some very interesting CEP technology just released and also being baked in the labs that could be very interesting for CEP specialists…

While we are on the subject,  Paul and I were debating which CEP vendor will get bought out next? Here are our guesses (with tongue firmly in cheek of course):

- Microsoft opens an eye and buys into a .NET-available CEP technology. However, they don’t smell the coffee and put it into the .NET framework until at least 2 years later.

- Oracle puts CEP firmly into the SQL camp, and continues to just be another player in the market - squashing the BEA work, and not deploying any CEP in its vertical apps for at least 2 years (indeed it will take 2 years to sort out a merged Oracle - BEA roadmap, let alone deliver anything with a future)

- IBM having recently bought Aptsoft, doesn’t know it has bought a CEP vendor because of the re-branding and follows the BEA model and licenses an open source CEP tool to deploy in some parts of their Websphere line.

- SAP buys Progress and gets Apama (and Mercedes sales in Cambridge UK see a spike).