This week OMG’s Technical Meeting has had most buzz around the BPMN 2.0 submission (and congratulations to that team, for which TIBCO is a supporter). Some of the other stuff going on includes:

• PRR or Production Rules Representation (which, for complex event processing like in TIBCO BusinessEvents, can include event-condition-action rules using standard forward-chaining semantics) starts the Revision Task Force process for PRR1.1. A few tweaks are due, but more interesting was to see 2 more vendors attend the PRR session this week. Also, note that UML tool NoMagic is presenting on PRR at ORF’09 later in the year…
• DMN or Decision Model and Notation started on its first stage of development, which is the identification of use cases and roles for defining UML-based decisions for a future RFP. We had some good discussions (which I’ll report in a future post once I have reported to the DMN community), and it is clear that this could be a very key standard for business modelers, end-users and tool vendors. Of course the relevance of this to event processing is that many CEP/EP systems’ role is to support decisions…

A somewhat hotter debate continues (/is) regarding the proposed Case Management RFP, which was developed from a Dynamic Business Activity Modeling RFI last year (which TIBCO responded to, and was also covered by our session at the recent Semantic BPM day in Berlin). Many BPM applications are also case management applications, but some case management requires more sophisticated event-handling, rule-driven processes, decision management, and case record management and recording (technologies that TIBCO mostly covers under BPM+). One school of thought is that the more sophisticated requirements for case management need to be rolled into the common BPM standards stack (including BPMN); another is that multiple different standards should be used flor flexibility (such as combining BPMN with BMM, PRR and DMN). From an event processing perspective, of course, case management (by one definition at least!) involves applying incoming events to the state of some case in order to determine whether processes need to be started, continued, halted or changed - in other words CEP technology can often be applied for case management areas in government, finance, healthcare, etc.

Some of the other case management discussions can be found from EBizQ, Bruce Silver, and Derek Miers.

Not really too CEP-related, except that events and event processing can take place anywhere: TIBCO’s Cloud Computing initiative is an announced agenda item for next week’s TIBCO NOW global webevent. I haven’t seen the content, but clearly the main area of interest is likely to be Corporate Cloud Computing (i.e. your distributed-managed data center), and there is an obvious connection to virtual service management (i.e. TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix product set).

TIBCO NOW also includes some EP/CEP content under the Enterprise Optimization thread:

• • Supporting Dynamic Change Management with CEP

  • Philippe Goujard, Senior Manager, Accenture
  • For a major micro-electronics manufacturer any change request is a long and complex process: it impacts machinery, production, logistics, training, and documentation. By introducing a complex event processing solution based on TIBCO BusinessEvents the client optimized monitoring of a complete “change request” project, improved time to market, and reduced risks associated with conflicting projects.

• • Keeping the Lights On while Managing the Complexities of Compliance

  • Lyndon Wilkin, Solution Manager, EnergyAustralia
  • EnergyAustralia (EA) has over 100 years of experience providing broad-based energy solutions to over 1.6 million homes and businesses. Hear how EA is using TIBCO software to gain real-time visibility into customer service levels, to detect and respond to events that could affect compliance, market obligations, and providing a foundation technology for enabling the intelligent grid.

• • The Future of Enterprise Optimization

  • Alan Lundberg, Senior Product Marketing Manager, TIBCO Software
  • Visibility into every facet of your business is key to improving quality, customer service, and cost control. TIBCO provides the ability to harness the power of existing data and in-flight information across your many customer touch points in real time. Managing your business at the speed of events is essential to be a leader in today’s market. This session will discuss the event processing technology that SouthWest, QWEST and CitiGroup use to drive competitive advantage and that analyst firm IDC ranked number one in the market.

Registration is, by the way, free.