More from the event processing vendors Blogs. This time from SAP. Its ESP product. SAP event processing Blog notifies on a new feature in the product that enables a derived event to trigger WSDL that prompts the user for requesting a predefined web service. In the EPN terminology, this WSDL is an event consumer. There are also other products that cross the borders and provide actions as part of the event processing product. As integration with adjacent systems is a major issue, there are already several solutions which extends event processing to the consumer side, with built-in actions. It is also useful to extend to the producer side -- the instrumentation process. I'll write about the producer side in another post.
Jeff Wooton from SAP posted on the SAP event processing blog a video clip showing a project done with Bigpoint, which is a gaming company, to get events from players in real-time and make offers to players based on their progress in the game and prediction of patterns of their behavior. The solution is based on Hana, SAP in-memory technology, and I guess on their event processing technology also, though the video does not give much details about the actual implementation. The goal is to maximize profit by personalize sells to game players. Event processing has various applications in game playing, as game has event-driven behavior nature, and also in dynamic personalization, which is applicable to other areas as well.
The news of this week which I got in multiple copies from multiple sources is the launch of a product called SAP BusinessObjects Event Insight, the SAP website that describes this product exhibits the picture I have copied here, probably a business person (by the dress) that get some event insights by phone, and looks happy about these insights. The product is probably a descendant of Aleri, which purchased Coral8, and later sold its assets to Sybase, which in turn was purchased by SAP. It is interesting to note that it is branded as "BusinesObjects" which is another SAP acquisition of a French BI company. This shows that SAP positions event processing as part of BI suite, which follows one of the current trends. When we started the event processing community meetings in 2006 one of the participants said that event processing will hit the mainstream of computing when all the four big software companies -- IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP will have products in this area. With this product launch, SAP joins the three others who are already there, along with some of the medium size software companies Progress and TIBCO. While all the "big dogs" are there, I think that there is also a place in the ecosystem to small companies and startups that will go for either niche requirements or domain specific products. It is also conceivable that small companies will create disruptive technologies that will take us to further generations -- meanwhile, greetings to those behind the project, hope to be able to learn more about it.
