Nimbus is the new “process discovery” technology in the TIBCO stack. I believe “process discovery” is somewhat understating the Nimbus capabilities: they describe the processes that are then used as real-time guidance (and control) by the “shopfloor workers”. One of the key success stories they talk about is Carphone Warehouse (UK’s Best Buy affiliate, and already a TIBCO CEP user) which resulted in 25+% improvements in customer satisfaction. So in effect, Nimbus can be as transformational to an organization’s manual processes as CEP is to an organizations automated processes. At TUCON we got a good overview of what Nimbus provides.

Of course, one of the interesting topics here is how this very people-focused way of defining business processes (so much so that even a standard notation for analysts like BPMN is usually eschewed) relates to the complex events that a CEP service may provide. I believe the benefits of CEP to Nimbus are as for any other BPM component:

• provide information (as complex events) to support business processes
• invoke (/engage) the workers or actors in the business process
• be invoked on demand to do some particular event processing
• monitor the processing of such business processes (performance monitoring etc)

However, thats just my opinion - the Nimbus guys of course also consider the “Power of Events” for their users…

For another view of the Nimbus session check out Sendy Kemsley’s blog.

Matt Quinn, TIBCO CTO, gave a technology update at TUCON today. There were a few interesting points about Matt’s presentation (from a CEP perspective):

1. Matt started with the need for Event Processing - the “2 second advantage” being about (a) getting the necessary events and (b) recognising the useful patterns to make decisions against in a timely manner. This is the core TIBCO focus.

2. The 2nd main point was on the need for businesses to adopt the “Event Driven Platform”. Part of this is what we also sometimes call the “Event Server”, or “CEP Platform”, or TIBCO BusinessEvents.

3. Matt touched on the improvements to the technology stack with BE5.0 (mostly around the BusinessEvents DataGrid capabilities). He then touched on the directions for BusinessEvents - more business models, more statistics / analytics support, business web support, and (more) ActiveMatrix deployment options. But note: no specific announcements at TUCON on these.

4. TIBCO has also grown lots in the vertical markets (and solutions) space. Most of these are CEP-relevant - for example TIBCO Loyalty Lab covering best-of-breed customer marketing that fits nicely at some customers with CEP-based advanced Customer Relationship Management.

5. “Big Data” is the “buzzword du jour” (or at least year or 2): Matt emphasized that all the data in the world is not much use to you in 6 months when you need to make a decision today. TIBCO’s responses included TIBCO FTL 2.0 (even more optimised) for getting more events, faster, and TIBCO ActiveSpaces 2.0 for bridging the big low-latency data world with the analytics and event processing worlds. And also TIBCO Spotfire 4.0 with lower latency gadgets for those wanting to use Spotfire for faster data viewing.

So a good session from Matt: also check out BPM analyst Sandy Kemsley’s views of the same content from the analyst briefings.

Sumit Sadana, VP Integration Middleware at Barclays Capital, and  TIBCO CEP specialist Mukesh Gehlot co-presented on the Barclays Capital implementation of a Dodd-Frank reporting system covering real-time reporting and auditing of Swap Data Repositories (SDRs). They constructed a Compliance Risk Reporting application that involved validation, compliance and reporting rules allowing correlations between trade messages (as events), and outputting tailored reports that are routed to designated audiences.

The performance / throughput and state management requirements pointed to a CEP platform approach, TIBCO BusinessEvents, whose declarative rule capabilities allowed for better rules management and the ability to add and refine rules as required.

Another TUCON keynote today was FedEx’s Robert Carter, CIO. Robert gave a great intro into the increasing importance of real-time event processing, painting the timeline of FedEx from the introduction of the first scanner in 1979 and Fred Smith’s quote on “the information about the package is as important as the package itself”. This history also covered the exploitation of middleware (TIBCO EMS) in 2002 and another goal for FedEx IT… “we have to be zero latency”.

Today FedEx deal with 2Bn transactions per day and 10+Petabytes of data. Robert said they “… need event decision capabilities”, and so are now moving to event-oriented systems (including TIBCO BusinessEvents). When you have a parcel travelling down a conveyor at 400ft per min (>120m per min) you definitely need to make your decisions fast!

I was curious that the gym managers at the Aria Hotel left the entrance open, but still asked you to scan your room card as you collected a towel and and water bottle. Well, MGM Resorts CIO Becky Wanta explained all in a keynote at TUCON - they are using (TIBCO) technology to gain the “deep knowledge” of customers to provide the “intimate experience” normally provided to only the casinos’” high rollers” (or “whales”). So they are tracking your every move in what they call the “inlife” immersion programme - allowing MGM to make better decisions for each customers.

It might sound like Big Brother, but if it means getting you the experience you want while in Vegas, why not?