IEEE Computer, the flagship magazine of IEEE Computer society, publishes in the April issue an article entitled: "Complex Event Processing poised to growth" by Neal Leavitt, under the section "industry trends". The magazine, which has relatively large distribution, explains the basic concepts and trends of event processing, and cite some of the EPTS steering committee members like active John Morrell from Aleri, Alan Lundberg from TIBCO, David Luckham, Roy Schulte from Gartner and myself. It also cits some other people in the community. EPTS is also mentioned explicitly. The fact that one of the popular professional magazines chose to dedicate and article, indicates a growing interest in the area, and this is just one indication. As I noted before, the February issue of International Journal of Banking Systems, which is a specific industry journal, has published an article on "event horizon". Enjoy !
As part of the orders that I got from my physician, to which I am humbly comply, is to spend around one hour walking every day, if I have time I am doing it outside, if not I am doing it at home on an electric walker. Yesterday I walked around, not far from home, and decided to take a shortcut via a woodland, not far from home, but not a familiar one, I saw a trail that seemed to go up in the hill, where the top of the hill was supposed to lead me back to somewhere in my neighborhood, there was a split in the trail and I chose a random one, and after five minutes realized that it leads to a dead end, however, I did not feel like going down, so I continued to climb up and pave the way among bushes, fallen trees etc -- quite irresponsible of me, especially as it was getting dark outside -- after 40 minutes of wondering I saw the back yard of an house, navigated there, and got safe and sound indeed to somewhere in the neighborhood. Somehow felt as return to childhood -- but not for long.
Anyway, today I would like to write something about the "Return on Investment" in event processing.
Mark Palmer, the current CEO of Streambase, has recently blogged about the fact that CEP is not about "feeds and speed" but about "ease of use", it is actually refreshing to see it from a Streambase person, since in the past some Streambase people claimed that the only reason to use a CEP engine is due to its scalability properties. Actually I have written one of my first postings on this Blog, entitled "the mythical event per second" saying something about it. I agree that there are some applications that require to satisfy high throughput or any other QOS metrics as a crucial requirement, but this is a secondary ROI type. The major one is providing abstractions that reduces the cost of the development and consequently the maintenance of event-driven applications. This is similar to what the DBMS discipline provides us -- as a grey-bearded old timer who is not completely senile, I still remember the times we have worked with file systems, DBMS provided many abstractions that makes the data oriented applications much easier to develop. The same goes for event processing, I am constantly saying to people who ask -- is there something new in event processing ? the answer is -- not really, event processing were hard-coded within regular programming for ages, however, since traditional programming languages and environments were not created to process events, the manual work required is quite substantial. The reduction in cost relative to hard coding can be substantial, and some customers have estimated it in 75% reduction. It will be interesting to do an empirical study about it, probably a challenge for our EPTS use case work group. More about ROI -- at later posts.
Yesterday, April 1st, was the traditional day for practical jokes, AKA "April Fool" day. The slideshare site has decided to do a practical joke on the people who post slides, sent Email entitled : "you are a slideshare rock star" saying: We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right. ;-). Since I have just posted a presentation there, I went to see what they are talking about and found out that hundred of thousands of people have visited my slides in the last day, since I don't really think that event processing presentations are that popular, at first I thought they have their counts mixed, but it took me 20 seconds to remember the date, and realized is is a practical joke. However, some of the other people have taken it seriously and started to notify the whole world about their tremendous accomplishments. At some point during the day, the site clarified that this is indeed a practical joke, and got some angry responses like -- after notifying all world about it, I am left humiliated. Some humor will not harm anybody, also, people should also have some judgement on what is reasonable before notifying the entire world, well - today is April 2nd and the counts returned to normal. It turned out that there are 83 views of the presentation I have posted in Tuesday, not really a rock star scale, but not bad for the community size for a single day. BTW -- this Blog broke the record high of views twice last week, once in Tuesday, and then again in Thursday.
Yesterday, we also had a meeting (not a joke) of the EPTS language analysis workgroup. We are advancing by setting the criteria for analysis over the dimensions -- events, meta-data, state, computational/execution model and programming model. All EPTS members have access to the memberw Wiki, and can make comments. If you want to be part of this process, and not an EPTS member yet, you are invited to join, the public website of EPTS has instructions about joining -- one can join as an individual member, and there are no membership fees. While the criteria list is being constructed, we also construct the list of languages that will participate in the evaluation, the goal of the evaluation is not to do a "beauty contest" of languages, but to understand the different functions that exist today in languages in order to abstract out a semantic model of event processing functionality. Again, EPTS members can update the language list on the members Wiki. The languages are either languages that exist in the products, or languages that have been used in the research community, which also may contain interesting features that do not exist in product languages. More about this workgroup - later.
I was asked by several people to post the presentation I have given recently in several places - the presentation including some views about where should we go in the next generation of event processing, what are the challenges in the various areas (the above illustration is a slide classifying the challenge areas) and a survey of some activities we are doing either in IBM Haifa Research Lab or with graduate students at the Technion. The presentation is now on slideshare;
enjoy.
This is a picture of the Bahai Gardens, one of the famous sites in my home-city Haifa, the Bahai religion is an interesting one, more modern than most religions (I myself am agnostic and do not practice any religion, so this is not meant to be an endorsement), the Bahai people see Haifa as one of their holy sites and invest a lot in the city, this week they have a major celebration. I have returned to Haifa after my short trip abroad, in which I have given four times the same talk about "event processing - the next generation" (I'll post in on the web soon). One of the discussion points have been what can the event processing discipline (complex or not) learn from other disciplines that succeeded. Coming from a database background, it is always interesting to me to make a comparison there. When relational databases started to become products in the early 1980-ies, I have been a database practitioner with experience in several DBMS products, and in the beginning I looked at the relational model without much respect, it seemed to me to be over-simplification that gives up semantics and creates a lot of anomalies. However, the simplicity has been the main benefit. The relational model has won, and also created a big research community around it that concentrated forces around a single model and developed query optimizations, more semantic abstractions on top of it and some other stuff. The fact that there has been a substantial brain power dedicated towards a single direction was a contribution to success. The fact that was not a critical mass of work around object-based databases contributed to the fact that its success has been modest. What can we learn from that in the "event processing" discipline ? We need to strive to find the formal model that will be the basis for concentrating the community around. The model is not extension to the relational model, since this extension will loose the main benefit of the relational model -- simplicity. There are several relational algebras around, but all of them do not meet the simplicity criterion, on the contrary -- they are quite complex. So it is still a major challenge for the community. More on that and possible directions -- in subsequent postings.
This are pictures from Aston University in Birmingham which I am visiting today within my short trip, it turns out that from the university network I cannot get into the IBM VPN, so my hosts brought one of the university IT guys who confirmed that they are blocking access to private VPNs, as a matter of security policy, and the only person who knows how to configure a bypass is away today, and even if he has not been away, he doubts if he would have willing to do it, I could in principle go to town an look for an Internet Cafe, but I am too lazy, and can live a couple of days without Emails. Besides that the visit (which has not been over yet) has been interesting and we may have grounds for collaboration . I have given my talk about "event processing - the next generation" third time this week (fourth time tomorrow in another place...), I'll post it on the web after my trip. One of the question I was asked was whether (complex?) event processing techniques could have predicted the economic crisis, but I'll leave discussion about predictions to another Blog posting. They also may teach an event processing course next year and are looking for a textbook to base the course upon.
Speaking of book -- the publisher of the "Event Processing in Action" book has gone another step and included the EPIA book (currently the first two chapter drafts) in the MEAP (Manning Early Access Program), the referenced site explains how readers can become part of the authoring process by receiving draft of new chapters, and making comments/questions to the authors using the forum to ask questions and communicate with the authors. As mentioned before the introduction chapter has been posted as a green paper, and is free download to all. Although open type of writing is somewhat more difficult and time-consuming to the authors then just write the book without interruptions, I believe that this process can improve the quality of the book beyond the formal review process. So this is a call for the community to take advantage of this program and help in creating this book. Hans Gilde has already made the first set of comments for Chapter one.
I am not sure whether it is related to blogging about the book being written, but yesterday (Tuesday the 24th of March, 2009) has been a record high in terms of amount of visitors for this Blog in a single day, today has not ended it, and is also looks strong, so I wonder why.
Tomorrow -- visiting the IBM Hursley Lab in UK, before returning home.
Today I am in Birmingham, England. Yesterday I have visited Cambridge University for a few hours and gave a presentation about "event processing - the next generation", second time out of the four times I am going to give this presentation in various places this week. Cambridge has a relatively large research group called Opera, directed by Jean Bacon and Ken Moody, which deals with event-based middleware (among other things). Jean is also the "grandmother" of Apama, since John Bates has been her Ph.D. student. Apama still maintains a site in Cambridge, and some of the Apama guys came to hear my talk. While there were some periods that I did other things and had looser connections with the research community, I have returned last year to a scientist position, and am trying to keep closer contact with the research community, by visits, collaboration, and helping in the organization of DEBS as the flagship research conference in the event-based computing area. Later today I'll be visiting Aston University here in Birmingham, where my good friend, colleague, and mentor, Robert Berry, has taken recently a position of Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences which I'll meet later today.
BTW -- for some reason I cannot get to the IBM VPN from here, probably something in security setting of the local Internet server, so anybody that contacted me by Email may have to wait until later this week.
