IBM recently announced "Websphere Decision Server". This announcement states that this offering combines business event processing with business rules management system to accelerate decision making.
There are several ways in which event processing and business rules interact, some of them are: an event, derived by pattern detection, triggers a rule, which makes it event-driven decision; the other direction is also valid: an execution of rules brings into decision and this decision can be reported as an event and may influence other decisions. Triggering decisions is one of the major uses of event processing (of course it is not the only one, e.g. event processing can be used for diagnosis or information dissemination), and it is a component in the automated decision making process, but these components mainly exist within islands (EP, business rules, optimization software and other means of decision support systems). One of the areas we are working on (we had a short report on it within the "fast abstract" session of DEBS 2010, as we were not in a position yet to deliver a full paper) is a unified conceptual model of event processing and business rules, where both are generalized as decision agents. this is still in the research phases, and not part of the product, nevertheless this announced offering provides step forward in achieving such an integration. More synergies in the decision space are expected.
Las Vegas. I have arrived here yesterday to participate and give a talk (twice) in the IMPACT conference, IMPACT is the annual conference that IBM is holding for its customers, especially the Websphere brand, but also covers anything that is defined under the "SOA portfolio". James Taylor is reporting about it, and is doing much better work than I can do, so trace his Blog for more details, however I wanted to bring my personal angle into it. The first day started in a plenary session with a huge, besides a very funny performance of Billy Crystal, who put three IBM executives on the podium to do sound effects to a story he told, there have been presentations of the senior executives of IBM Software Group, Steve Mills and Tom Rosamillia on the main theme of this year's conference: Smarter planet. When I heard the presentation I could not help smiling to myself, practically all customer examples that have been described under "smarter planet" have included event processing component in a key role. One of the customer examples has been the one described by my colleague Guy Sharon in the 4th EPTS event processing symposium, about tracing people in industrial facility to verify authorization of people to be in a certain place accompanied or unaccompanied, since the customer was exposed in public, I can mention it has been British Petroleum, this is something that the IBM Haifa event processing team has been heavily involved in creating this application. Some more applications in different industries have also been presented. Event Processing is being used far beyond its early adopter, the financial markets industry. I view it both inside and outside IBM that people who have been somewhat skeptic about event processing 2-3 years ago, talk differently about it now. Actually, the interest will yield more investments and advance this area to cope with the various challenges, but this is another story.
The main business value that event processing is achieving, according to IBM studies, is business agility. A study done reveals that in today's environment, almost all CEO are trying to re-think and change their business processes, and often software is an obstacle. Event processing is considered as an enabler for such agility. I always believed (and wrote about it several times) that the main business value is agility and not high performance that is required by a certain segment of applications, while agility is required by many more... Reality has its own strange ways...
A comment about branding -- IBM decided more than a year ago to use the brand BEP (Business Event Processing) for the entire portfolio of capabilities in the various IBM products related to events, and not adopt theCEP acronym used widely in the industry . The idea has been to emphasize the "business user orientation". Anyway, I'll leave the branding discussion to the marketing guys -- the content is more important.
There are more than 20 sessions in the conference that talk about event processing from different angles -- from the business perspective, the technical perspective, various related products in IBM (e.g. enabling CICS applications to serve as producer and consumer of event processing), my own session later this week deals with the future, but I'll Blog about it at later time, it is late, and I need some rest, getting up early every day for some conference calls...
