Jerome Reygrobellet presented the STMicroelectronics application where various TIBCO technologies including CEP were used to improve operational efficiency in the their manufacturing processes by “identifying and removing non-value-added tasks” as production proceeded. STM are in the semiconductor business - $10B in sales in 2010, 53,000 employees, and 14 production sites around the world, and launched this productivity improvement program in 2007, with the IT project started in 2008. The first version of the application was delivered in 9mths (June 2009). The project involved using RFID to track and trace the production components, and a “Smart and aware Sampling Tool” to optimise the amount of manual testing at each stage of the production process. The goal was to achieve a >10% improvement in production efficiency and achieve an ROI of less than a year - in fact the results for the first version were an improvement of 14% and an ROI of < 6 months. Impressive.

Richard Brenton Jr gave an excellent presentation on PJM’s use of TIBCO BusinessEvents for operational visibility - the control rules for the electricity supply grid, executing against operational events. The main point made here was that for true business control of rules, you need to not only business rules in the vocabulary of the business, but represented in the form the business requires (i.e. one shape of rules management does not fit all).

PJM have built a custom operations dashboard that includes the ability to control and update the supply control rules. Their rules management system or BRMS? MS Sharepoint! Sharepoint provides the workflow, version control, etc, for the “rule objects” that in turn are sent to the running rule engine as rule parameters. This exploits the power of the underlying Rete rules engine with the programmed rules being business rule templates. So Sharepoint is the rule repository, and new rules are fed to the system as events (with an update latency of 2ms). So a Sharepoint form provides the BRMS user interface…

Richard gave a good example of the power of the rule-driven, event-based approach. This past Summer’s East Coast US Earthquake (and subsequent shut-down of a major nuclear power plant) was followed by Hurricane Irene. PJM operators swiftly updated their control rules to suit. Given not many businesses in the E USA would have predefined rules for an earthquake followed by a hurricane, the ability to adapt “on the fly” using business rule technology proved pretty useful.

Doug Safford from AllState Insurance gave a fascinating overview of a large Insurance IT department’s migration from a high-overhead ($1B pa budget!) mainframe shop to an architecture-driven organisation. This primarily revolved around the introduction of a standard ESB - a business event bus in this case, with a standard middleware solution (TIBCO EMS) with a standard framework (to handle the governance needs of tracking, logging, etc). It also involved much simplification of the IT processes: going from 10 to 2 data centers, for example, and from 15,000 (!!) to just 4 (!!!) AS400-class servers.

Doug mentioned that the enablers for their Business Process Management were frameworks, services, events and rules. Of these:

• Services are carefully managed: they have deployed 4,000+ TIBCO BusinessWorks engines in the service and framework areas!
• Moving to an Event Driven Architecture allowed much more business control of their business events, such as standardised routing and de-duping. The events feed their CEP engines as well as their Data Warehouses for analytics.
• Separation of the business logic / rules was seen as critical in such a regulated industry; they could not afford to have volatile rules replicated in software code around their systems. AllState have standardised on TIBCO BusinessEvents as their rules engine (with 800+ engines today, and the fastest growing tool deployment for them).

In terms of the ROI for their investment, Doug mentioned:

• Marketing campaigns can now be deployed from new in weeks rather than 6-12 months, or from existing campaign templates in days rather than months.
• Rule changes, such as for routing leads to agents, can be done overnight, usually from the BAM reports. In one example they monitored the success rates for agents in closing business, re-routed more leads to them, to gain a 15% increase in closing rates…

I would not be at all surprised to see this AllState IT transformation to be covered in business management books and MBA programs in future!

Jérôme Rodrigues and Florian Splendido of Orange, the mobile arm of France Télécom, presented on their architecture for handling M2M - basically large numbers of devices communicating (here via Orange SIM cards) and requiring both state management and message routing.

Interestingly Orange had gone through a build vs buy (i.e. tool vs solution) comparison for their M2M solution, and found that the use of a high-throughput, high-availability/fault-tolerent “event server” (a.k.a. TIBCO BusinessEvents) was the better solution in their case. Although Jerome and Florian mentioned that they did not consider the M2M handling as “CEP” per se, the need for data aggregation and useage throttling / quota management meant that some “complex events” are certainly involved in the solution. Their other comment was on the need for an in-memory solution, with the volume of data precluding a database-oriented architecture. And they also use TIBCO Hawk for monitoring their systems…

Sumit Sadana, VP Integration Middleware at Barclays Capital, and  TIBCO CEP specialist Mukesh Gehlot co-presented on the Barclays Capital implementation of a Dodd-Frank reporting system covering real-time reporting and auditing of Swap Data Repositories (SDRs). They constructed a Compliance Risk Reporting application that involved validation, compliance and reporting rules allowing correlations between trade messages (as events), and outputting tailored reports that are routed to designated audiences.

The performance / throughput and state management requirements pointed to a CEP platform approach, TIBCO BusinessEvents, whose declarative rule capabilities allowed for better rules management and the ability to add and refine rules as required.