Five years to the first event processing symposium

Today we can mark five years to the first event processing symposium.  In the picture you can see from right to left - Roy Shculte, David Luckham and myself - all of us five years younger.  The fourth partner to organize this meeting was Mark Palmer, at that time from Progress, now in Streambase.    This was the first meeting of the community - before the meeting we did not know each other;  two months before the meeting the mood was quite pessimistic, since it seemed that we'll not have critical mass, as some of those we invited did not think that they are doing event processing, they thought that they are doing stream processing.  Roy Schulte was instrumental to convince everybody that they should participate, we thought of a meeting of 50-60 people and ended up with 72 people.  
The list of participants is here:

Num	First Name	Last Name	Affiliation
1	Tom	Abraham	Xterprise
2	Asaf	Adi	IBM
3	Rohit	Agarwal	Digital Harbor
4	Rajan	Ahmad	Red Rabbit Sotware
5	Tim	Bass	TIBCO
6	Jerry	Baulier	Aleri Labs
7	Steve	Benfield	Agentis
8	Mikael	Berndtsson	University of Skovde
9	Robert	Berry	IBM
10	Richard	Brooks	ISO New England
11	David	Cameron	AptSoft
12	Mani	Chandy	Cal Tech
13	Henry	Chang	IBM
14	Norman	Cohen	IBM
15	Shlomi	Cohen	Actimize
16	Josiah	Collens	MITRE
17	Sanjay	Dalal	Streametics
18	Opher	Etzion	IBM
19	Tom	Fox	Wachovia
20	Bill	Gassman	Gartner
21	Dieter	Gawlick	Oracle
22	Rohn	Griggs	Wachovia
23	Helge	Hess	IDS-Scheer
24	Bill	Hobbib	StreamBase
25	Daniel	Jobst	CITT
26	Chris	Kaprielian	MITRE
27	Paul	Kim	MITRE
28	Harpal	Kochar	Oracle
29	Vaikom	Krishnan	Celequest
30	Chung-Sheng	Li	IBM
31	Tao	Lin	SAP
32	Eugene	Litvinov	ISO New England
33	Ling	Liu	Georgia Tech
34	Roger	Loeb	The MarTech Group
35	Anthony	Lopresti	Systar
36	Noah (Ed)	Loy	MITRE
37	David	Luckham	Stanford University
38	Alan	Lundberg	TIBCO
39	Susan	Malaika	IBM
40	Wolfgang	May	University of Goettingen
41	Shailendra	Mishra	Oracle
42	In K	Mun	MIT
43	Yefim	Natis	Gartner
43	Ido	Ophir	Actimize
45	Elan	Oren	Leanway
46	Mark	Palmer	Progress
47	Francis	Parr	IBM
48	Boaz	Peer	Actimize
49	Ronen	Perlmuter	Leanway
50	Nelson	Pertacek	TIBCO
51	Beth	Plale	Indiana University
52	Greg	Porpora	IBM
53	Arnold	Reinhold	Hurwitz
54	Harvey	Reed	MITRE
55	Jonathan	Rosenoer	IBM
56	Gunther	Rothermel	SAP
57	Aleksey	Sanin	Coral8
58	Roy	Schulte	Gartner
59	Karsten	Schwan	Georgia Tech
60	Marco	Seirio	RuleCore
61	Ed	Shea	FRS
62	John	Trigg	Progress
63	Mark	Tsimelzon	Coral8
64	G	Venkat	Red Rabbit Software
65	Hari	Verma	G4
66	Rainer	Von Ammon	University of Regensburg
67	Elvira	Wallis	SAP
68	Eric	Wayne	IBM
69	Robert	Wilson	Mitre
70	Jeff	Wooton	Aleri Labs
71	Jim	Zafrani	Synthean
72	Stan	Zdonik	Streambase

As you can see we have representatives of various vendors,  some of them do not exist any more,  some customers,  some academic people and some analysts.     

After some search, I found that David Luckham's site also had a page about it which is still there.  

The meeting started with several presentation about different view points on event processing, starting with David Luckham, and ended with Mani Chandy,  who played the devil's advocate.    Some of the speakers of the first day are still involved in the event processing universe like - Mike Palmer, Stan Zdonik who represented Streambase, and now back in Brown University, and the program chair of DEBS 2011;  some of them are not -- like Mark Tsimelzon, who was the brain behind Coral8, and now works for some VC, and Tim Bass, a colorful person represented TIBCO, who ran an opinionated blog for a while, both are not active in the community anymore.

The second day was the application days -  there were groups in parallel that discussed applications of EP in real-time (military) applications, BAM, BPM,  risk and compliance and RFID based applications.  It was interesting to note that the person who took upon himself to organize an algorithmic trading session notified us that due to the "top secret" nature of this application type, nobody agreed to present.  

The immediate action item was to start working on glossary, as we realized that different people are saying the same things in different terms.   I think this has been improved, not totally resolved.

The other consequence (eventually) was the establishment of the EPTS, and the event processing community, which is still there.     talking about the event processing community -  the DEBS conference submissions were closed yesterday, and there is a significant growth in number of submissions (statistics will be published after the review process will end), so the community is still growing.

Five years have passed - and many things happened since then,  but this will always be the first event of the community. .