RTInsights online magazine: the April 2013 issue is out

After some delay, the current issue of the RT Insights online magazine is on the air.  

This issue consists of four  interesting articles in the four themes of the magazine:

Business Strategies:Chris Taylor, of TIBCO Software, shows readers how Caesars Entertainment keeps track of thousands of customers at over 50 casinos and hotels with CEP, collecting data on each customer's behaviors and transactions to personalize customer experiences and reward big-spending and loyal customers in real time.

Frontline:  Nenad Stojanovic, PhD, of the Research Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe, explains a leading edge approach to personalizing content called Adaptive Augmented Reality (A2R) which adapts content in real-time to each individual's behavioral cues.

Tools and Tactics:Chris Bird, Principal Consultant at MomentumSI and one of the most experienced practitioners in event processing , explains the uses of both in-stream and out-of-band models for event detection in the analysis of ongoing transactions

On the Horizon:Published author Phil Windley, PhD and CTO at Kynetx,  discusses the coming of the "trillion-node networks" of computing devices and programmable chips embedded into every conceivable product and device (known as "Internet of Things"), thus adding intelligence and automation to even the simplest tasks 

You can freely download this issue from the RTInsights website.  Hope you'll find it useful, and looking forward to your feedback (on behalf of the editorial board and the publisher).   

Letter to the editor in the Communications of ACM

Paul Vincent attracted our attention to an article in the Communication of the ACM written by Julian Hyde from SQLstream, and wondered about some of the assertions that were expressed in this article. Reading the original article, I indeed found some inaccurate assertions that somehow missed in the review process of the CACM magazine. After communicating with the editor-in-chief of CACM, he suggested that I'll write a short response (and the author will have a right to respond to the response). It takes some time, but today I got the electronic copy of CACM and found that my response, and the response of Mr. Hyde to my response have been published. You can read for yourself (under the title - "event processing anywhere"). In essence I have mentioned three inaccuracies in the original article:

1. On whether event processing is a blanket term for stream query systems: actually event processing is much broader term then stream query

2. There is a religious war between SQL and non-SQL vendor. I have not noticed the religious war, many vendors have both SQL and non-SQL interfaces.

3. Event processing is restricted to one application type in the financial services area, while other application areas are neglected; this is indeed a common misconception, and I have written about it in the past.

Mr. Hyde took his right of response by saying that the event processing vendors fail to satisfy the expectations of the BI community, this is a new claim, which does not seem to respond to any of the issues above.

Paul Vincent in his Blog's post raises another interesting assertion from the CACM article that streaming query engine is a new technology -- well, new is a relative term.

Bottom line: while people are used to view marketing material with a grain of salt, it is typically expected from a respectable magazine which employs review processes to be more accurate, since people tend to take it as a reliable source.