Interesting to see that James Taylor is planning a Decision Management platform report this year (2012). James is particularly focused on the relationship between analytics and rule / decision execution technologies, which are of course increasingly popular business optimization techniques [*1]. The report prospectus defines 3 main technology areas of interest: rule and decision engine capabilities (c.f. TIBCO BusinessEvents and ActiveMatrix Decisions), predictive analytics or data statistics capabilities (c.f. TIBCO Spotfire, Spotfire S+, and Spotfire Miner), and optimization technologies.

In the latter category of optimization tools there is an interesting extension to S+ available called S+NuOpt. This provides techniques like LP and MIP, QP, and MOP to allow solving of constraint-rich problems like planning and routing. Traditionally these have been complex, long-running, CPU-intensive algorithms solving particular problems like “what airline routes should we offer this Summer”. But there is increasing interest in applying these resource (asset, personnel etc) optimizations against more and more exception events (such as the closure of some airports due to weather) - termed event-driven optimizations - and where the world of near-real-time event processing and operational decisions push up against the long-term strategic decision processing. Having cloud-based on-demand computing resources for irregular (but still computationally expensive) optimization computations, invoked as required through the assessment of complex events, is likely to be a key capability in future.

Although TIBCO Spotfire is commonly used to report on, and analyse results from, event processing using TIBCO BusinessEvents, I have not heard of any public case studies of NuOpt being invoked from CEP and event processing in an automated fashion. But if any usecases get published, I’ll add them here!

* Notes:

[1] See TIBCO Software 2010-2011 FY reporting on the success of CEP and analytics under “business optimisation”.

TIBCO had their 4th quarter analyst call last week, and SeekingAlpha’s transcript has a few CEP mentions for TIBCO’s Q4 and 2011 FY:

• “Our business optimization category, which includes both BusinessEvents and Spotfire, grew over 50% in license revenue for the year and has doubled in the past 2 years.”
• “Business optimization was the clear growth driver this quarter, up 45% over last Q4. Both Spotfire and BusinessEvents, which make up this category, showed tremendous growth, and each had its largest quarter ever. BusinessEvents is also playing a larger and larger role in our platform sales, and therefore making up a larger and larger percentage of revenue on many deals.”
• “…everybody is moving into an eventing engine. And some people — we have clients that are actually replacing app servers with event servers. …”
• “It seems like the world is moving more and more to intelligent systems and driving intelligent outcomes in various verticals. “
• “…so everybody wants to completely go to the eventing platform if you’re a retailer. … Everybody wants to be able to go all the way down to the consumer. They want to be able to make you the offer before you leave the aisle, not 6 months after you leave the store. … so Macy’s was an early TIBCO adopter to go to this eventing platform. And I think their results have shown it. …”
• “One of the use cases we’re very excited about is for cybersecurity where people are now trying to look at events and anticipate that there might be trouble. And the — what we did in the government is now all of a sudden of interest everywhere. And in addition to our technology now being built into the smart grid, they’re using the cybersecurity component because once you have a smart grid, it can be hacked and that’s not so good. So we have some fantastic use cases around that. …”

Two of many interesting tidbits of news from last weeks internal TIBCO  meetings were:

• TIBCO competed against a C/C++-based CEP product normally seen in Financial Services Front Office applications (i.e. extreme low latency applications). But because TIBCO BusinessEvents could effectively exploit the tested multi-threading / multi-core system, its throughput proved vastly better. Perhaps the Financial Services Front Office folk are missing a trick here?
• One fascinating project involved a Proof Of Concept (POC) that processed 500M events in 4 days, achieving up to 75K events per sec using 11 agents deployed to a 24 core server, with business control via decision tables. What surprised me was that the POC was inserted into a live operational business system - how about that for faith (or rather, reliability)!

The previous CEP Market review earlier this year had a few suggestions for new entries: so we ‘ve updated the chart with what data we could find. Hope this is useful.

Note: please comment on this post any suggested changes, births, deaths and marriages in the event processing tooling market, and I’ll incorporate the changes in the next version.

Some folks may have noticed some changes in the TIBCO corporate website, including various references to some of the TLAs in the above expression:

• 2-Second Advantage or 2SA: a business competitive enabler, achieved by exploiting E3.
• Event Enabled Enterprise or E3: an IT compliance requirement for real-time business support, requiring a number of IT capabilities.
• Messaging / Event Bus / etc: the plumbing needed to deliver events around a business (~ as they happen).
• Au(tomation)*: the basic IT building blocks of BPM, SOA, MDM, etc.
• Event Processing or EP: matching / extracting the necessary event patterns as they occur (also mostly solving the problem of Big Data exploitation).
• An(alytics)*: extracting actionable information from data / big data.
• Cl(oud)*: flexible extensible deployment mechanisms.
• So(cial)*: corporate (human) knowledge exploitation in real-time.

Notes: * = unreasonable abbreviations, of course. Please don’t confuse this with a chemistry experiment.