Just had an interesting presentation by Tim Lambertstock at the BCS on “The Changing Face of Payments” - how payments are made (yesterday and the USA: cheques / checks; today: cards) and interbank transactions achieved (e.g. SWIFT). And of course, future payments through mobile phones and Near Field Communications. Interestingly this corresponded with a recent TIBCO Kabira presentation about the increasing role of mobile payment systems…

• 2.5Bn of 4.7Bn people in the world do not use financial services - and 88% of these non-users are in Africa, Middle East, Asia and C&S America.
• Conventional channels for banking services are too expensive: consider a branch cost of $250K or ATM at $10K, serving an audience whose daily income may be $5…

On the other hand, mobile phones and telcos are developing apace in the “developing world”:

• Mobile phone ownership across parts of Africa has gone from 4% to 51% in the last 8 years (!!!), reaching 70% of adults last year.
• Mobile payment systems have been set up for example in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Pakistan already.

One of the concerns that Tim mentioned about this “future world” for payment systems was security. On the other hand, if they can roll this out successfully in Nigeria then we probably should worry about something else!

Another Press Release this week announced a merger between the 2 recent TIBCO acquisitions, Kabira and Netrics, and the ActiveSpaces data grid - which duly becomes a “product family”.

* TIBCO ActiveSpaces®, which is available now and will be renamed TIBCO ActiveSpaces® Data Grid, builds on a scalable peer-to-peer distribution model and provides the ability to store and analyze data in memory. Designed on the premise that today’s business is characterized by data in motion as well as data at rest, ActiveSpaces® Data Grid enables high-throughput, low-latency data processing to support the generation, consumption and evaluation of events that continually influence business operations in real time.

* Businesses often need to insure data integrity and consistency even in situations where extreme speed is required and traditional transaction managers would not be practical. To be built on the Kabira Transaction Platform, TIBCO ActiveSpaces® Transactions, which is scheduled to be available within the next 12 months, is being designed to meet this requirement by providing a fully distributed, in-memory transaction management mechanism. TIBCO acquired Kabira Technologies in late April for an undisclosed amount.

* Leveraging TIBCO’s acquisition of Netrics, TIBCO ActiveSpaces® Patterns, which is scheduled to be available within the next 12 months, will greatly accelerate transforming, rationalizing and making business sense of very large and potentially inconsistent data sets. The need to analyze data at rates far beyond traditional data access methods has become key as enterprises deal with real-time, event-driven operations and decision analysis. Using continuous, in-memory matching and subscription capabilities, ActiveSpaces® Patterns is being designed to provide mechanisms by which real-time data and event patterns can be evaluated appropriately matched even when the data is inconsistent and names or descriptions do not perfectly correlate.

Interested customers should contact their friendly TIBCO account rep forthwith!

Another interesting TIBCO technology acquisition with potential side effects for high performance event-processing: the Kabira transactional JVM has joined the TIBCO team. This provides a JVM (called Fluency) that has built-in (to quote the developer guide):
• Transactions
• Distribution
• Shared Memory Persistence
• Keys and Queries
• High Availability
• Replication

Transactional integrity is of course orthogonal to event processing: some event processes, especially those that impact multiple services and processes, need a transactional context. In complex event processing, identifying complex events is rarely “transactional” per se, but could depend on some state / include some transactional context. And of course, the business process associated with a complex event may well need to be a transaction…