Friday, March 25, 2011

On the Virtual event processing symposium: the EPTS use case report


Yesterday we held the EPTS virtual symposium - a kind of live webinar that was broadcast from the OMG Technical meeting in Arlington, Virginia.   This was a complex logistic operation - some of the talks were live on the site, some were live on the phone, and some recorded.  Some obstacles, but it generally worked. There were 77 remote participants and few in the room.    This is behind me and I can breathe some air  - now on a one day visit in the IBM site in RTP, North Carolina.    The EPTS meeting consisted of presentation of the event processing manifesto, that I've described before,  some discussion on standards that I'll Blog about soon, and some report of EPTS working groups.    
The first of them that has been presented was the report of the use case working group, with a first public summary of the survey results.  Pedro Bizarro posted the presentation on slideshare.
While the results reflect those who answered the survey and is not necessarily an accurate sampling of the market situation there are several interesting observations:


  1. Event processing applications can be found now in multiple industries (not just financial), some of the applications were in energy and utilities, defense and aerospace, Transportation and logistics, Healthcare, manufacturing and more.
  2. The most cited reason for using EP is enhance/improve user services - and this probably relates to adding functionality that was difficult to add other way, others are - cost reduction, agility (faster development) and compliance
  3. Many of the applications use database/file as sources, which is more of the traditional way, other are using streaming sources like messages or subscriptions.
  4. Most applications are doing various types of notifications -- only a quarter are triggering automatic actions (this is somehow related to the decision oriented observations of James Taylor that I've blogged about recently).
  5. Most applications do not require high throughput ( less than 1000 events per second), around 5% of the application need more than 100K events per second -- this is an observation made before by Roy Schulte.
  6. Most applications have 100 event producers or less (actually almost half have 10 event producers or less)
  7. Among the non-functional properties: high availability was the biggest requirement, while security is still not a big concern 


As written - this relates just to a sample of applications and is not necessarily represent the entire market, but I think that these observations show some of the current trends.  I'll write about other sessions in the webinar later.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello Opher,

I think that from a technical perspective the survey result is quite interesting, because it blurs the borderline of event processing to traditional database techniques as data warehousing quite a bit.
So maybe we can also say, that database driven methods (I am not talking about messaging within a database) do also represent event processing. The only way I am currently struggling with is, how the concept of event processing networks can be applied to a data warehouse concept since it is mainly based on pull concepts and not on push.

Many greets,

Christoph