On our proposed EU project - Take I

CDG Airport, Paris.

This is, more or less, how the A3 road in Paris has looked like today when I was on my way to CDG airport, when I asked the taxi driver how long it will take to the airport he said - no more than 40 minutes, well it took 2 hours, and could have taken more, unless at some point he lost his patient, drove through the next exit, and navigated with his GPS through some small streets
to get to the airport from a different direction. Since the price of the taxi is a function not only of distance but of time also, then the price also exceeded (by far) his estimate... This was not the only traffic related event. My airline sent me SMS to notify me that my flight home has been cancelled and they re-booked me on the next flight 2 hours later (that's why I was not pressed of the long trip to the airport). They sent me the SMS in French, while I was sitting in a train, and the passenger sitting opposite to me was kind enough to translate me, 5 minutes later they re-sent me the same SMS, this time in Hebrew.

I ended the day in visiting ILOG, acquired by IBM, and before that in the morning, together with some of our partners, we had a meeting with the EU commission in Brussels, about a proposed EU project. This is planned to be a relatively big project that will look at the future web services infrastructure which will be event-driven, and include event-enabled BPM. . We got good and useful feedback, and have a lot of action items, like finalizing the consortium. I'll write more about it in the next few months.

Welcome the ILOG team to the blue giant

Recently, the acquisition of ILOG by the blue giant (IBM, the company who pays my salary) has been completed.
It was interesting to read the InformationWeek article which had event processing in the title of this article.

ILOG is, of course, well known for its business rules product ( I had some history in this area in my past...).

There are various relationships between business rules and event processing technologies, and there are also various opinions about the various relationships.... I have blogged a year ago about this issue.

While I looked at business rules from EP perspective, Some ILOG guys also investigated the opposite direction, in the last EPTS meeting we had met Pierre-Henry Clouin, who blogged about it , prior to the EPTS meeting. Now we can continue the short discussion we had in Stamford .

Another ILOG guy who had a guest posting about EP issues is Changhai Ke.

Joining a big corporate is certainly a cultural change (shock for some), but also opens some horizons, so I wish Pierre-Henry, Changhai and the rest of the ILOG team a smooth transition and we'll certainly meet in one of the blue corridors.... Welcome on board.