On the EPTS 4th event processing symposium

Still in Connecticut, whose flag you can see above. The three days of the 4th event processing symposium are over - what a relief, took a lot of effort to organize it - but it seems that people were happy with the content; I'll let other blogs review the meeting, some already done it - Brenda Michelson had several postings (this one, for example), Paul Vincent also wrote some of his impressions. Needless to say that I am exhausted from these days, but I still need to summarize the (relatively big!) amount of action items and send the EPTS members, may be tomorrow morning. Anyway - some short impressions:

• It seems that people feel more mature now to discuss issues like: benchmarks and languages, that they did not really want to discuss before, we have action items on both areas.



• Brenda Michelson has given an interesting presentation in the business oriented panel, showing that EP is actually under-hyped relatively to some other hypes, the panel moderator, Alan Lundberg, asked the audience if anybody think that EP (or CEP) is over-hyped, and no one raised hand. It should be noted that audience consisted not only of vendors but from analysts, consultants, academic people and customers.



• The use cases workgroup demonstrated some of the varaince we have under event processing (not sure that everything is CEP according to the glossary definition, but EPTS is about EP, not just CEP). The six has different use cases were: Alex Kozlenkov from Betfair talked about fraud detection in the betting business, although the audience did not agree that all his examples represented fraud; Arkady Godin from MITRE talked about large dissemination information (sophisticated pub/sub in the area of weather), Brian Connell from WestGlobal talked about performance monitoring of mobile operators (a monitoring system), Dieter Gawlick from Oracle talked on "first responders" in case of emergency - again a dissemination system, Guy Sharon from IBM talked about facility safety - a kind of monitoring system, and Richard Tibbetts from Streambase talked about alternative trading venues (operational system).



• Susan Urban presented a list of research challenges, and there was report about various research projects, including two presentations from IBM Research which has very active research in this area; Fred Douglis talked about "system S", while my colleague from IBM Haifa Research Lab, Guy Sharon, talked about the history of AMiT, and about the current research projects we are conducting now, the one which attracted attention is the EPDL (Event Processing Description Language) project, and it seems that we may accelerate its exposure to the larger community.



• Chris Ferris, the IBM CTO of Industry standards, explained the value of standards in general started with the chinese king who unified China, following by a standard panel - it seems that the community is now more mature to start talking about standards than in the previous years - I wonder what is the reason.



• Today in the business meeting - quite a lot of activities and working groups have been proposed. We'll see how much of it will materialize, people are more enthusiastic to commit on investing time when they are out of the office, until we return to the grey reality... but it seems that the EPTS activity is accelerating.

Some Trivia:

• We had 70 participants (the upper limit we set) - 41 vendors, and the rest - academic people, customers, analysts and consultants.

We had participants from 11 countries - see chart below (since the conference has taken place in the USA, we miss much of the European academic community).

More - Later.