On some recent news

Today I'll write on some (relatively) recent news that I would like to comment on.

First -- in the event processing area, the news of the week has definitely been the acquisition of Aleri (which last year acquired Coral8) by Sybase. Now most big and medium software vendors have either acquired or developed event processing capabilities. This is in-line with the trend of having event processing as part of a bigger game, we see some companies who are taking event processing as part of BI/data management game, and some as part of enterprise middleware game. The event processing industry has started as an event processing stand-alone game, since it was started by start-ups and not be big companies, but when the bigger vendors get into the game, they treat it as part of a certain portfolio. Streambase (with its expected amnesty program) now carries the flag of growing as a pure play event processing platform that can work with various platforms. I guess that there are segments in the market for both approaches, and we'll have to see where the wind will blow. Getting to standardization can help this approach.

Not really new news -- but I've noticed recently that my favorite social network, LinkedIn has come with new interface when one checks the "my contacts" option, which enables you to browse your connections in easier way, and view them by tags, names, companies, location, and recent activity. In LinkedIn when one crosses the 500 members, the number of members appears to the outside world as 500+, I guess that with the growth of the network they might consider the number, since I think there are many people with 500+, in my case, the current count is 737, and is typically growing every week. I have been introduced to LinkedIN when getting introduction from Mark Palmer, and since then the network keeps growing. The companies tell me that 237 are from IBM (and various of its sub-organizations), 17 are from Technion (my second home), and then 10 from Google, and other companies that have between 5-10 connections are: Amdocs, Microsoft, Progress, CA, Intel and Oracle. As for location, 331 connections are from Israel, 101 from the greater NY area, 49 from the SF Bay area, the list of countries contain also countries I've never visited like - Taiwan, Japan, Russia, India, Singapore, Brazil and New-Zealand. One of my main uses on this is to find Emails, but it also provides me information of who moves where.

Last but not least -- news about the Event Processing in Action book -- we have finishing the cleaning up, and getting it to production, the idea is to launch the book officially in IMPACT 2010, the IBM Websphere big conference, will write more about it. It seems that for the week of January 31, the book has been in the list of the early access best sellers of Manning.

More about it later.