A few months ago we speculated that events (and event processing) “in the cloud” would probably appear best suited to some social networking type of application (in addition to the usual Platform-As-A-Service remote “systems center” use case). Lo and behold, TIBCO has introduced a corporate “twitter-type” service called tibbr for distributing messages across an organization, deployed into the cloud, and based on the TIBCO Silver cloud product. Soft of antithesis of MS Sharepoint…

For those wondering on the relevance of tibbr to TIBCO CEP technologies, note that TIBCO Silver exploits TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP technology under the covers. tibbr also exploits  TIBCO ActiveSpaces. As for tibbr potentially being used as an event channel for direct processing of tibbr messages in BusinessEvents - well this should certainly be possible, but finding some good use cases might be a challenge.

A post on exploiting (in this case for air quality monitoring) the ultimate live sensor grid - the world’s cellphone population - reminded me of some discussions on CEP for social / community uses (as described by Prof Mani Chandy at the recent ISS09) and also some dicussions with TIBCO colleagues on the role of CEP in the cloud (e.g. supporting such large scale sensor nets without particularly low latency needs). The big question with either - who will pay for it - which translates to - who will it make / save money for?

And with that, TIBCO’s newest offering, Silver is off and running. 

Announced yesterday at the NOWonline show, it seems to be getting a good bit of attention in the press, analyst and blogosphere communities.  eBizQ picked up on the announcement and commented on its use of CEP in the automation of cloud-app-balancing. As for me, my head is a bit cloudy at the moment, from all the fuss.

So what is Silver, and what does it have to do with CEP? 

Everything. 

TIBCO Silver is new software infrastructure for “cloud” computing.  A “Silver” lining for the clouds you might say. 

And why is this important for CEP? 

Because it’s an infrastructure product that embeds a CEP engine in order to solve problems related to governance (managed access, security, privacy and adherence to regulations), and scalability (uses SLAs to automatically scale up / or down as needed).  The kicker is that it’s automatic, so both the governance and the scaling is accomplished inherently through embedded monitoring, management and event-decision-action rules rather than manual intervention and programming -which AFAIK, is an achilles heel for current cloud products being introduced. 

This should be an interesting announcement for developers of different types of Business2Consumer or Consumer2Consumer apps that are likely to vary widely in resource requirements. The embedded governance allows for various levels of authorization, authentication and encryption policies to be dynamically configured. This is important because some services should be open to everyone and some services, well, just shouldn’t.

As in most cloud architectures, and not counting those who simply put the cloud moniker in front of their latest software product, there is no software to install or hardware to procure or provision, which reduces the barrier to develop and deploy rapid IT solutions (whether that’s infrastructure, platform or applications)

TIBCO Silver is currently in Beta. It will be interesting to see the deployments when they start rolling out.

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.