TIBCO Software has announced the acquisition of Loyalty Lab - a company specialising in cross-sell and up-sell solutions, which for TIBCO customers (such as in telco, retail and banking) has often meant applying CEP to analyze customer needs in real-time, often with a dose of data analytics, and responding accordingly and quickly. The Loyalty Lab founders commented:

Loyalty is no longer a nice to have—in today’s mobile and social media-centric world, you gotta have it. When we started the business, sometimes we had to spend hours with prospects explaining what loyalty was and how brands might be advantaged by having automated systems programmatically up and cross-selling their new, better, next-best and evangelistic customers regularly. We intuitively knew but now emphatically know that it’s just 15% of a brand’s customers that almost always represent 85% of their profits.

Thanks to Patrick Austerman from the TIBCO Netrics team for an interesting update on the Matching Engine and Machine Learning Engine. Currently this bipartite graph-based technology is used to identify matches to inputs, typically as a kind of search, in processes like book retailers (”identify a book”) and government (”identify a citizen”).

Clearly this could have huge ramifications for any BPM or CRM use case that involves identifying records and cases via form-filling - text matching to improve accuracy and speed in customer record look-ups. Imagine the effect on call center productivity if agents can quickly and accurately identify callers and cases? Indeed, Netrics’ use in TIBCO CIM (MDM) can be considered an example of this. Not surprisingly, Netrics’ heritage is interactive marketing where identifying and associating web users is of paramount importance.

Other relevant domains include analytics (for example alongside TIBCO Spotfire) and of course CEP (for text pattern detection). In the latter case the matching engine might be useful where there is any possiblity of inaccurate information in an event - consider a manually entered field, or barcode scanning error. When combined with rules to eliminate false positive matches, this could be very useful.

What the Matching Engine does is to learn text (and optionally numeric and date data) associations, regardless of locale, language, etc. But the Machine Learning Engine is another type of decision engine, used for where information is missing and cues must be taken from the absence of that information (in other words, many fields but sparse data). So far it is used in scoring applications.

Overall then we might expect Netrics “matching technologies” to become de rigeur in best-practice BPM solutions, with a strong possibility of some interesting applications in the CEP space… we’ll see if this pans out in 2011!

UK retailer Carphone Warehouse was in the news recently, announcing their transition to a TIBCO-based CRM system - in this case conventional workflows augmented by event- and rule-driven processes.

This use case has a good write-up (via MWD) available from TIBCO’s web site: some choice quotes are:

Background:
The Carphone Warehouse is a European telecommunications retailing and service provision group, based in the UK. The company is large, and has a record of fast growth: in its last financial year it reported revenues of over £3.9bn, but is still growing over 30% year­-on­-year. It currently employs around 20,000 staff in eleven markets. As its name implies, the company was founded as a mobile phone retailer. …

As is the case for so many large organisations, there came a point where the weight of “legacy” functionality became effectively unmaintainable in the face of continuing business change …  as a result, The Carphone Warehouse decided that as well as implementing a new billing system, it would also implement a new, distinct and separate CRM system. …

A service­-oriented approach to implementing the renewed billing capability and integrating it with the new CRM capability was identified and promoted early on … TIBCO products (Enterprise Messaging System and BusinessWorks) were selected for the SOA infrastructure … initially [the chosen CRM vendor's] inbuilt workflow functionality was selected as the platform for this. However as the project unfolded, the importance of long­-running processes, and asynchronous event-based flows … became increasingly apparent. It was at this point that the project team decided to extend The Carphone Warehouse’s investment in TIBCO technology to include the iProcess Suite (TIBCO’s BPM technology offering) and BusinessEvents (TIBCO’s Complex Event Processing offering).

Implementation:
The processes currently being implemented in the billing/CRM replacement implementation are focused on automating broadband service provisioning, and are prime examples of our “straight through processing” scenario …

The Carphone Warehouse is using TIBCO’s iProcess technologies to define and coordinate long­ running, stateful, system­-to-system integrations; it’s using TIBCO’s BusinessEvents technology to handle other stateful interactions, where there’s a need for near-­real-­time processing. …

Results:
…There’s already been one major success from this approach. In its retail business, the team has used the iProcess technology to deliver a reusable telecoms service activation process which has enabled the company to progress business expansion across Europe much more broadly and quickly than anticipated. The implementation cost just 20% of  the original estimate, and the reduced cost for retail operations “in territory” has made it much easier to roll out new network deals and offers.

Note: Carphone Warehouse are no doubt using TIBCO BusinessStudio to develop iProcess applications - so now is a good time to mention that BusinessStudio 3.2.0 is now shipping. Although this doesn’t cover CEP (or CEP-driven BPM), it does now include some iProcess Conductor (Gantt-based goal-driven BPM) features…

The Banker runs annual technology awards, and this year the Citibank CEP application supporting real-time marketing is one of the winners. The article quotes:

“The system deploys complex event processing technology to evaluate static and dynamic events against a customer profile and ‘propensity model’, to determine in real time the next best offer the bank can extend to the customer.”

“Because the system operates on a ‘rules basis’, it can be adapted by business users to design the rules that govern a particular campaign without the involvement of IT staff. “

“The bank is also using the intelligence in the system for fraud prevention and proactive customer service.”

One of the demos to watch for on the TIBCO stand at Gartner next week will be “Predictive Customer Interaction Management for Insurance”. This correlates customer events and models customer behavior to maximise the effectiveness of customer interactions - something not likely to be very easy in traditional, insurance mainframe batch systems. The app is based on customer systems and exploits the TIBCO BusinessEvents complex event processing solution, with its high performance, stateful rule execution, state modeling and data grid support.

Note that this application is not a million miles away from the SOA-in-CRM vision that Forrester ’s James Kobielus presents in his article “Real Happy in Real Time”. This covers the role of CEP in CRM, as one of a series covering SOA’s impact on CRM. Note he also covers the role of MDM in CRM: interesting as we at TIBCO are already seeing the co-existance of MDM and CEP in customer CRM-type applications.