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).   

Using event processing to make "big data" becoming "fast data" by Alex Alves

As part of the first issue of the online magazine "Real-time business insights", Alex Alves wrote an article on the use of event processing in big data,  recently Alex remarked on this article in his blog,  saying that while the common big data platforms are batch oriented,  turning "big data" into "fast data" is done by combining event processing with big data technologies.     Stay tuned for the second issue of the online magazine,  now in preparation. 

Launching the online magazine: Real-time Business Insights: Event Processing in Practice

There are two events today -- the 15th birthday of my daughter Daphna (in the picture taken in our recent family vacation in Malta)

Daphna's birthday will help me remember also the other event happening today -  launch of the online magazine.  I have written about the idea of the online magazine before,  a few months ago - took some time to accomplish - assemble and editorial board, solicit material from authors and find a publisher who believes in the idea to take care of the logistics.   

After some deliberations - the name chosen is shown on the Logo below.  The idea is to start with several pilots issues, the first of them is being launched today.  The magazine consists of several sections:

Business Strategies presents the customer's perspective on how other enterprises gained value from processing streaming data and events in a variety of use patterns.

Tools and Tactics presents the practitioner's perspective with best practices and lessons learned from those who develop event-based solutions.

Frontline presents the community perspective with provocative and thought provoking opinions.

Industry Insights provides in-depth education about the use of real-time business insights in a particular industry.

On the Horizon provides the researcher's perspective on what's coming next in

applied research projects and new technologies.

 EP News keeps readers abreast of the latest industry developments

Each of these section has a section editor, I volunteered to serve as editor-in-chief and section editor of the blogging section ("On the Horizon") - to set a personal example, I have also written the first one, expressing an opinion which will come at no surprise to this Blog's readers.  

The online magazine can be downloaded from here:   (registration is required by the publisher), 

You are encouraged to download, react (the magazine's website links to the EPTS LinkedIn group), distribute to anybody who might be interested, and contribute to any of the magazine's section.

Enjoy and react!

DEBS 2012 - keynote by Sethu raman

This morning started by some statistics about paper acceptance by Patrick Eugster, the PC chair. It seems that the acceptance rate in the scientific track was lower than previous years.  

The first keynote was given by Sethu Raman, who was until recently the "distinguished engineer" in Microsoft responsible for StreamInsights.    Sethu gave a relatively short talk (with a lot of questions and discussions) entitled "event processing solutions in the enterprise - a waypoint or launchpad". The illustration above is taken from his opening slides, he had such nice illustrations and citations all over.

You can download Sethu's presentation from the DEBS 2012 webpage (the organizers is doing a good job by copying the presentations from the presentation computer and posting it on the website quickly). 

The main message of Sethu is not surprising (as seen from the information management universe):

•  Event processing has a big potential to play in multiple roles -- real-time analytics,  ETL.  distributed query framework 
• It also plays in many different industries and is not a niche play
• There is a major issue is of conception.  There is aggressive messaging of the "analytics" community which drowns the event processing message in some cases,  The analytics community claim that they can solve all problems of the universe by database centered way, and that event processing is required only for small niche of very low latency requirements that cannot be satisfied by DBMS technology.
• The reality is that the value proposition of event processing is not restricted to the low latency, it is actually reducing the high cost of developing applications - however this message is not heard in a clear enough voice, relative to the other aggressive voices.
• The term "complex event processing" is a confusing term,

I have discussed it with Sethu in the break,  I actually agree to all the assertions.  The over-hype of analytics, and the messaging that comes sometimes from the analytics people (which is not really backed up by technical facts) makes the impression that analytics subsume the functionality that is proposed by event processing.   I am not sure how ling the over-hype of analytics will continue (I think this is quite high in the hype-cycle and will get to the disillusionment phase, since it is indeed over-hyped),  but the messaging of the event processing community about its ROI as complementary and sometimes contrasting to analytics should be cleared heard.   How? -- this is part of the discussion about the EPTS online magazine.

More - later 

More on EPTS and an online magazine

One of my most read posts on this Blog this year (actually 2nd place so far), has been a report on the all members conference call of EPTS we held earlier this year.    The idea discussed was to create online magazine as the major activity of EPTS.  After some delay,  in the last few weeks we have advanced in discussions among those who expressed interest.  There has been a keen discussion (conference calls and Email exchange) with some supporters and some concerns.  

Here is a background, and reminder about the history and current state of EPTS.

EPTS was formally founded in June 2008; there were some pre-EPTS activities in the form of event processing symposia, work on glossary and Dagstuhl seminar since March 2006.  EPTS also helped shifting the DEBS conference to become the primary research conference of the event processing community.   

The work in EPTS have been organized around working groups, some of the working groups have created visible results: the glossary is widely cited, the tutorial provided by the language analysis workgroup has more than 9000 views and downloads, the reference architecture workgroup provided several tutorials.  Some other workgroups did not succeed to take-off or create visible deliverables.  EPTS also partnered in initiating the Dagstuhl seminar in 2010 that generated the "event processing manifesto". 

There are 98 registered members in EPTS, 43 organizational members, and 55 individual members, among them 29 people from academia, and the rest are either consultants, or individuals working for non-member organizations.  Some of the members were active in work-groups and participated in meetings, and some were passive.     

Part of the mission of EPTS has been to educate the industry, and reach out to large audience, this mission has not been fully achieved so far, and much of the activities have been more inward-oriented among the members, these activities also decreased with time.  

Discussions late last year and earlier this year brought the idea of trying to reach out to wider audience and have more impact on the industry.  Alan Lundberg from TIBCO did some analysis and raised the idea to concentrate around a website that will be attractive to larger audience.   

In recent weeks we discussed the feasibility of such website and the way to succeed. 

Here are some of my  thoughts following these discussions:

The target audience should include  anybody that deals with events in any form (commercial EP products, custom code, embedded event functionality within products/packaged application, event producing -- such as sensors, event consumption, event transportation and more), and for any purpose (event processing application, event-driven BPM,  event-based decision management, event-based analytics, operational intelligence, continuous BI, Internet of Things,  event-based robotics, autonomic computing, bio-medical applications and more).  In the research community it should also involve both the community whose research area is directed towards advancing the event processing technology, as well as tangent areas such as: operation research, BPM, data mining, robotics, bio-informatics, sensors,  social media and more

 A critical success factor is that the type will appeal to various audiences to generate enough traffic.  Professional management of the site that will be backed on commercial basis is the preferred option;  We are now checking with an experienced person who might take the site ownership and commercial management. .     

A role model for such a site might be the RFID Journal  which seems to be a professional and popular website. 

Some concerns were raised about the feasibility both in demand and supply of content.   We have decided to make a feasibility assessment of these two sides (assessing the demand by doing survey, and locating qualified people who will be willing to be area editors within this website).

 If we'll determine that the feasibility assessment will look positive -- I'll propose to the EPTS members actions to make it happen,  otherwise -- we are back in square one.   Our surveys will go out in a couple of weeks and I'll report the progress on that.   More - later. 

EPTS activities in 2012

In Wednesday we held an open conference call of EPTS members.  The call discussed EPTS activities for 2012.  While in the past EPTS concentrated in working groups that have created glossary, reference architecture, investigated use cases and languages, and some other stuff, the idea is that in 2012 EPTS will attempt to address larger audience by creating online magazine which will consist of:  news (including connecting to social media),  general material about event processing (starting point: FAQ taken from analysts in this area),  and industry specific content.   We are now looking for volunteers to set up all aspects: orchestrating the content ("editorial board"),  soliciting readers and topics they are interested ("reach out board"), and a coordinator for sponsorship and advertisements.    Anybody interested to participate - please let me know.   I'll post updates in this Blog