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.

Interesting article in the New Scientist titled “Inside Facebook’s massive cyber-security system” about a system they call the “Facebook Immune System” (FIS)…

…an all-seeing set of algorithms that monitors every photo posted to the network, every status update- indeed, every click made by every one of the 800 million users.

That is one big event monitoring system! The stats are impressive too:

• 25Bn read-write actions monitored per day
• Peak 650K events per second

Per the published paper, published under the Microsoft Research topic “Querying Large Distributed Graphs“, FIS has the following main features:

• Classifier Services: various statistical algorithms
• Feature eXtraction Language (FXL): a features and rules specification language - in other words, “patterns” - including stream processing expressions
• dynamic model loading and training: also a common attribute of CEP systems
• Policy Engine: the business rules engine also handling Classifer Services monitoring, executing the FXL expressions in rules.
• Feature Loops (Floops): the aggregation mechanism taking feature extraction output and creating the complex events called features for the classifiers.

They also seemed to have exploited crowdsourcing as indicators for fraud: … [the system also] checked to see which messages were being flagged as spam by users and blocked messages with similar keywords in the text.

In some respects this is social rule / knowledge elicitation - something that can also be done on other social systems like tibbr, and likely an increasing trend that came up several times at RulesFest this week.

Meanwhile, TIBCO announced a cybersecurity deal with the US DHS.

Prof. Zicardi of ODBMS.org (remember ODBMS?[*1]) published an interesting interview with HP Fellow (and past RDBMS architect) Dr Goetz Graefe on the rising importance of “data storage” without the twirling-disks-thing. Of course this is a trend very much in evidence at customers of TIBCO with (”NoSQL”-type, or more accurately, “SQL-optional”) technologies like TIBCO BusinessEvents using distributed DataGrid technology for faster-than-disk / more-scale-than-a-single-process event correlating. And for those  looking to apply “diskless” to SOA as well as EDA, note that TIBCO ActiveSpaces now includes the TIBCO BusinessWorks interface for doing data distribution in BW processes…

With CEP we have long questioned the need to “bung everything onto disk” and instead process it (the incoming events) as they arrive… of course you will want a historic record for some events, but fundamentally you don’t usually want to follow the old-model of “put it in the database then worry about / process it later”. Unless you are an RDBMS sales guy anyway!

Notes:

*1. “Object-oriented” makes perfect sense until one tries too hard on encapsulation (of behavior). For example, a business rule relating new-order events with existing customers could be encapsulated in the order event or the customer event, but in reality should be in neither. Although you might want to be able to refer to related rules from either…

Last week Forrester analysts Mike Gualtieri and John Rymer published a briefing on the “Future of Business Rules Platforms”, looking at the rules engines that have been so successful in providing business logic platforms for the BPM and SOA worlds. Their opinions are worth noting as they reflect what we are seeing in the marketplace… and their findings are somewhat given away in the report’s subtitle “Customers Are Moving To Event And Decision Management”…

Mike and John mention 2 patterns for CEP and business rule convergence:

1. CEP can drive business rules via separate platforms. This is analagous to CEP (complex events) driving business processes and decisions as required, and where bolting CEP onto the front of mature BPM and SOA environments can make sense (note [1]).
2. CEP can use rules to provide event pattern detection merged with business (decision) rules. This is the use of the same platform to provide an event-decision-action process (note [2]).

Notes.

[1] These patterns will be familiar to TIBCO customers through TIBCO BusinessEvents calling TIBCO BusinessWorks, and TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM calling TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager.

[2] Forrester also say, on the second pattern, “only Tibco is in a strong position to expand from use of rules to define event handlers into general business rules applications“!