On Impact 2008

This is the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, the place that hosts this week the IMPACT 2008, a very big customer conference of IBM Websphere (more than 6000 persons).

The hotel is huge, the logistics is very good, and the program is very diversified. James Taylor described the two first days in his Blog . One of the main themes in this conference was the issue of business event processing, IBM's product Websphere Business Events, was announced last week. Today I have given a talk on the concept of "business event processing" together with my colleague Steve Lyons (a former Aptsoft guy), thus I have done my share. This was well covered by the press. The main message behind it is enabling the business user to control the behavior (e.g. define patterns) of EP applications, this concept won a lot of interest from the IBM clients that were present.

On another matter - congratulation to Mark Palmer for his new position in Streambase, Mark is definitly one of the notable figrue in the EP area.

More on actions as part of event processing

The recent Blog posting by Matt Rothera from Apama has argued that actions are fundemental parts of CEP, and added two reasons: avoiding latecny and providing seamless view by the user. Both of these claims are valid, the question is that makes the "action" part - an integral part of event ptoceding or not. What I stated in a past posting is that there are two types of actions - those which are done internally inside the "event processing network", and those that are done in the outside universe, and those, architectually are part of consumers and not of the event processing network. This is still valid, if the action is a "buy" or "sell" it is executed inside some trading system, and not in the event processing system, the event processing system can, at most, make a decision (or recommendation, depending on the type of application). This leads to an observation on packaging - if the event processing product is a "stand-alone" then it probably needs additional capabilities that are not pure event processing in nature, however, then the integration effort of these products may be high in some cases. I also stated in a a past posting that event processing is part of a bigger picture, thus, it needs to be nicely integrated inside a bigger whole - e.g. an application integration middleware from the run-time aspects, and then the latency issues are solved, since everything is using the same infrastructure, and QoS properties can apply to the entire application. It should also be nicely integrated from modeling, tooling, and interface aspects, thus a customer will be able to express E2E application.

My main claim is that in many cases - event processing capture part but not whole of an applicaton, and thus we need to look anyway on the bigger picture anyway, however, it is not realistic to develop event processing products into an entire middleware...

Call for EPTS founding members

After some delays (getting everything through legal procedures in multiple big companies...) we are starting to prepare for the official launch of EPTS that has existed informally in the last couple of years. The founding steering committee consists of representatives of -

Coral8, Gartner, IBM, Oracle, Progress, Streambase, TIBCO and Professor David Luckham as an individual member, in the future members of the steering committee will be elected, so both company members and individual members can be elected; We are now issuing a "call for founding members", which means that any company, or individual person, that will sign the membership agreement by May 9, will be included in the list of founding members that will be mentioned in the press release notifying the launch. Here is the call - you may have already received it through other channel.

Call for EPTS Founding Members

EPTS - the Event Processing Technical Society - is going to be officially launched in late May or early June (exact date – TBD)
The EPTS goals are to:
Increase awareness (promote mindshare) about event processing, including understanding what its value is, producing a common glossary, and highlighting the current state of best practices,
Collaborate with various standards organizations making sure all standard efforts are in sync (EPTS will not become a standards organization)
Help establish Event Processing as an academic discipline
EPTS has existed as an informal group for the last two years, holding three Event Processing Symposiums to date; for details see: meeting 1, meeting 2, meeting 3

We invite participation of all vendors, individual participants (academic people, independent consultants, and employees of non-member organizations), and customers who would like to contribute to the evolution of the event processing area. There is no participation fee, but all members (organizational and individual members) must sign the EPTS Members Agreement.
EPTS activities will be performed through workgroups, and periodic general meetings. Examples of current workgroup tasks include glossary creation, use cases analysis, event processing meta-modeling, the study of event formats, and event processing academic education.
Benefits to members include the ability to identify new requirements or topics for discussion, lead or participate in workgroups and other community activities, being listed and potentially quoted in official announcements and press releases, and the ability to be elected to the EPTS Steering Committee,
Please respond immediately by email to Opher Etzion

If you are interested in becoming a founding member.
If you are able to sign the membership agreement by May 9th, 2008, you'll have the opportunity to appear in the list of founding members in the launch press release.
In order to join, please take the following actions:
1. Print the EPTS Member Agreement document

2. Sign (for individual member) or have an authorized representative of your company sign (for a company member) two hardcopies of the agreement. Keep one for your files. You will need to produce this copy if the EPTS Steering Committee ever makes a request for it at some point in the future.
3. Fax one copy to:
Attention: Mike Kaiser
Fax #: 1-845-489-9958
4. Courier the second hard copy signature to the following address for EPTS archival purposes:
IBM Corporation
Attn: Mike Kaiser (JGWA/062/M313)
3039 Cornwallis Rd.
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
Phone: 919-254-7605
Note: Along with this hardcopy, please include the name, e-mail and phone contact information of the PR person that EPTS should coordinate with for the launch press release.

Moving to a new job - but actually staying in the same office

This is part of the Haifa Bay as seen from the IBM building (not from my office - I am in the back side!). On April 1st I am moving to a new job - without physically moving office (which means that I am still in IBM).

What role I am completing ? in the last three years I have been in a technical strategy role for the IBM Websphere product organization.

I have arrived to the product organization when people there did not really know much about "event processing" (well, IBM has done some forms of event processing in the past, but the people inside IBM did not think of that this way), I have worked on technical strategy, and business strategy, chairing and participating in workgroups, worked on business evaluation with the business side of IBM, working on comprehansive requirement survey in multiple industries, participating in many reviews, preparing answers for skeptic people etc.. I am leaving this position in a state that IBM sees event processing as part of its main stream middleware (as evident in the acquisition of Aptsoft, and some other activities), and as the next big thing.

Of course, the relationships between my presence and IBM's decision to jump on board the event processing ship may be just a coincidence...

Anyway - it seems that the next challange for me will be in shaping the next generation, while I still be somewhat involved in the work on the current generation.

One of my findings is that the "event revolution" has not occured yet, and I would like to go back to the drawing board, and do some work to address some fundemental challanges. In order to concentrate on this goal, I am re-joining to the IBM Research division and will focus on these research challanges (hopefully without many interruptions, each organization collects its own taxes on one's time, and IBM Research is no different ). What has not changed ? I am continuing to represent IBM in the EPTS and will honor all external commitments.

Stay tuned for call for membership in EPTS - coming this week.

My OMG talk

The picture is of Washington DC, as seen from the Arlington side. Two weeks ago in the OMG meeting in Arlington I gave a talk on EPTS and EP standards, the talk has been now posted on the OMG site, so you can download it from there. In the next few days we'll advertise the call for participation for EPTS, towards its official launch - stay tuned.

On Event Driven Marketing

Following my previous posting that talked about the effect of event processing on the life of some people, I came across another interesting article today that describes event-driven marketing, where event can be: "customer service call, a type of transaction, going through a spending level in a particular period, customer's birthday". This is different from traditional marketing, finding the right opportunity to issue personalized marketing is a capability enabled by processing events. More interesting applications - later.

Event Processing can change some people's life

After returning from a business trip, and a few days family vacation to celebrate the Purim holiday, I am retrurning to the Blog. One of my loyal readers, Eran Toch, has suggested the topic of this posting by sending me an article saying that the former NY governor, Mr. Spitzer, has started his way down of his high office, when caught by a "anti money laundering" program that looked for simple pattern of three events. Well - this is a classic event processing pattern, and it seems that it has changed the life of a few people (starting from Eliot Spitzer himself, and in a chain effect, many other people). This reminds me of a visit that a group of Eurpoean journalists visited the IBM Haifa Research Lab in Israel in 2003 or 2004, and I was asked to give them a talk about CEP (I am not sure even if we already used this name) - after giving them some example of use cases, all of a sudden one of the journalists had the association to Orwell's big brother, and after he mentioned it, there was some philosophical debate between some of the journalists to us, whether this technology has a potential to be a nightmare for human rights. My opinion is that many technologies can be abused, but can also used for good causes - criminals (and auditors) can use patterns to find flows in systems, and organizations can use similar patterns in order to trace the same criminals that are trying to take advantage of flows... No matter how used -- event patterns is very powerfull, and its impact on our life has not even scratched the surface of its potential.