I enjoyed the latest YouTube IBM Smarter Planet advert, linking “smarter information to smarter decisions”. Of course, it has long been recognised that you need to combine smart event processing (complex event detection for real-time information handling) with smart, managed decisions (decision and/or rule, management and processing).

Unfortunately there is still only a very short list of commercially available CEP products that augment event processing with integrated decision processing (i.e. CEP embedding BRMS, for technology pundits).

Maybe this will change in 2010. Or maybe TIBCO’s CEP marketing tagline needs to change to match IBM’s shiny TV ads: “smarter ways to find smarter information leading to smarter decisions”. Ho hum!

The second day of the EPTS meeting in Trento covered some diverse topics such as:

• Network and Systems Management: event processing aspects (including views from Tivoli and CA) - this is already recognised in TIBCO with CEP-based products like ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager providing much of the same role.
• CEP Research areas had some fascinating topics, including:
  • The role of CEP in Advanced Robotics (Bielefeld University)
  • IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative: basically the need to integrate event processing with business decisions (which may sound familiar) and advanced analytics (also familiar). From TIBCO’s perspective though the main area requiring research here is event-based analytics - determining what analytic algorithms (beyond rules) are adaptable for (or need redeveloping for) the event-based, dynamic, IT world.
  • Some interesting event pattern benchmarking (from FZI) using their own research algorithms as well as open source tools, with some interesting results … possibly this will help restart the EPTS Benchmarking initiative, and for sure the vendors would like to try out the same patterns.
  • Intelligent Event Processing (Toronto University) showed how Markov models could be used in network intrusion detection.