This year DEBS is in Europe, and in Kings College Cambridge, England - surely a model for the Harry Potter Hogwarts School of Architecture, with a quite amazing internal maze of staircases that entirely obviates any need for an on-site gym, while maybe requiring some kind of RFID-enabled roomkeys so event organisors can detect and rescue guests from obscure parts of the college.

Fellow Event Processing Technical Society colleagues Adrian Paschke (Freie Universitat Berlin) and Catherine Moxey (IBM CICS) and I presented a tutorial on the EPTS Event Processing Reference Architecture journey and development, with additional contributions from Alex Alves (Oracle) and Themis Palanos (University of Trento), on Monday this week. The presentation is now posted up on Slideshare (see below or here, or if in a Flash-free environment, check out the PDF).

One of the interesting audience questions was, if I recall correctly, why the EPTS Reference Architecture team did not differentiate their architecture more from that of, say, the BPM community? This was a little surprising as nowhere had we mentioned the words “business process” or “process orchestration”; neither had these really come up in the Reference Architecture discussions (other than as consumers of events). However, we did refer to the Fast Flower Delivery use case discussed in Opher Etzion and Peter Niblett’s forthcoming book on Event Processing, and Opher assured the audience that the event-driven processes therein were valid event processing requirements as opposed to BPM. An interesting point of reference here was the TIBCO user presentation at TUCON earlier this year that also found out the difference in BPM and CEP for their particular problem.

A related comment - from an end-user organisation - was that the sales teams of companies selling CEP solutions were often too quick to offer their BPM offerings rather than their CEP solutions. For an end-user to complain to vendors that “you are trying to sell me the wrong stuff” is pretty interesting! Wonder which vendors they were?

… may be credited to Chaucer in the 14th century, but applies today as ever. Last week I presented on CEP to a large European energy provider, and jokingly included as a sample event a “world cup score” that could lead to a change in real-time energy requirements [*1]. Then this morning a fellow attendee arrived at the DEBS conference in Cambridge, England, commenting that he nearly missed his morning flight (on the morning after the match) due to a power cut [*2].

PS: Congratulations to Spain!

Notes:
[1] In the plot for this animated film, the World Cup causes a surge in “waste water” after the match. Energy demand might rise as audiences “prepare a hot beverage” after the match… etc etc!
[2] Of course any “world cup -to- service failure” causal relationship is more likely to be some human element such as, maybe, the night shift failing to turn up for work…