EPTS (Event Processing Technical Society)

Hello from Orlando, Florida. I am here to attend two meetings that directly relate to event processing: the EPTS third event processing symposium and the Gartner event processing summit, next week there will also be the EDAPS workshop of the VLDB conference in Vienna - which will make it all together six days dedicated to event processing meetings of various forms. I'll be writing about these events in the blog, but as an introduction I would like to provide some background about the EPTS and what we are trying to do. I have got to think about the need to have an event processing community, in 2005, when I was assigned by IBM to do a requirement survey in various industries to understand what event processing is from various viewpoints. There were two points that came across - one is that many potential customers are not aware of what event processing really is (though they may be familiar with some terms), and the second is that there is confusion in terms, and general conception that this is a proprietary, immature, area. Clearing the terminology, start thinking about standards, and get general awareness, cannot be done without a community, and in fact, the reaction of customers of having such a community is very positive. It took a while to organize the first meeting, and there was a concern about the success - since there are some vendors who claim individually to have invented this area (we'll talk about the professional history and roots other time), it may be difficult to bring them all together to agree to anything. I succeeded to get IBM to host the first meeting, and found partners that got to the same conclusion that community is needed, Mark Palmer who started the Yahoo mailing list, David Luckham who is a long time evangelist of this area, and Roy Schulte from Gartner who helped bringing some of the others - and then TIBCO, SAP, Oracle and Streambase joined the organizing committee for this meeting. The meeting has been a social success, we learned to know the people in this area, we understood that terminology is the first issue to handle - and got a first working group to look at glossary, and heard some position presentations and some use cases. We had even better second meeting hosted by Oracle (Shilandera Mishra and Dieter Gawlick), in this meeting we have decided to form EPTS, as a formal consortium, and work on formalization has taken a while, and the final proposal will be discussed in the business meeting today. The idea is to have an open consortium of both organizations and individual members that will work through working groups in various areas, the aim is to incubate standards proposals - and hand them over to standard organizations (the coming OMG RFP on meta-model will be first instance, probably), host community meetings, work on industry- academia relationships, common terminology and better understanding of this area in various aspects (use cases, use patterns, architectures, application types etc..). We are starting the 3rd meeting today - and I'll report back on interesting insights about this meeting. More - Later.