Second acquisition in one week: Software AG acquires Apama

This week is certainly a game changer in the event processing universe. 

The purchase of Apama by Progress Software in 2005 has been a major milestone in the event processing history,  acquisition of a start-up by a (relatively) big company, and start of a new period.   Today's announcement is the acquisition of Apama by Software AG.   This is different from the acquisition announced earlier this week of Streambase by TIBCO  since it is not an acquisition of an entire company, but of a division within a company, and of course, its technology and customers.   According to the announcement, John Bates, Apama's founder and Progress Software's CTO will join Software AG, and lead Apama again.  

I wish John and the Apama team good luck in their transition, and hope that a company in the magnitude of Software AG will be able to promote the state-of-the-art in the event processing area.

Singularity is getting nearer -- a controlled cockroach

In DEBS 2012 I participated in the "Gong Show" and presented a short presentation about event processing as part of the singularity vision (key to immortality).   Today, thanks to Rainer von Ammon, I noticed a cool project called RoboRoach, that is seeking crowdfunding.   There is a short video demonstrating its work.  In essence the cockroach has implant that based on BlueTooth controlled commands creates false sensing for the insect which effects its behavior.    We may say that the natural event processing system of the insect is modified by feeding false events.     The claim is that this technology can have implications on overcoming human neural and sensor handicaps.   Note that on the webpage describing it there is a keen discussion of comments with various types of rejections on moral grounds.   I am not joining this criticism, I think this is amazing scientific achievement with a potential to change life as we know them.   I keep tracking singularity related news.

TIBCO acquires Streambase

The hot news of today in the event processing perspective is undoubtedly the acquisition of Streambase by TIBCO.   For some time I wondered when Streambase is going to be acquired and by whom as it stayed the largest independent event processing vendor.  Today in the world of merging and acquisitions, such companies are attractive to complement the portfolio of bigger vendors.   

Mark Palmer, Streambase CEO (until now) - announced the acquisition on Streambase's Blog, Mark also recorded a short message that can be found on Streambase's home page.   Chris Taylor described the acquisition from the TIBCO side.    Chris emphasized Streambase capabilities in the big data space.  

It is interesting to see how the "event processing portfolio" of TIBCO will evolve now, and how the synergy between Streambase and the existing event processing portfolio will be realized.

Anyway - interesting move, congratulations to my friends from both sides of this merge, and good luck! 

Proactive event processing for intelligent transportation system

I came across a new publication whose citation is: " Yongheng Wang, "A Proactive Complex Event Processing Method for Intelligent Transportation Systems," Lecture Notes on Information Theory, Vol.1, No.3, pp. 109-113, Sept. 2013. doi: 10.12720/lnit.1.3.109-113".   This paper is a follow-up to our work on proactive event-driven computing,  and applies events coming from the Internet of Things towards intelligent transportation system, proactively mitigating traffic congestion.  This work originates in China, who made Internet of Things as its flagship project.   We have looked at similar problem  as one of our use cases for EU project proposal (that did not win the lottery).

  

Academic use of event processing for trading education in UIC

I have written before about academic courses on event processing that are typically given in computer science or information systems academic programs.  Recently I came across a report on academic course in University of Illinois in Chicago, that is given in the Finance program of its business school using the  OneTick product.   The product is used for education in financial markets and trade simulation labs.  This is a case of use of event processing to support business functions, and it will be interested to view more of it, both in trade and other business areas.    

Event processing in gaming: SAP and Bigpoint

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.

More on fraud detection from IBM - the MoneyGram case

I have recently written about real-time fraud detection solution from IBM based on SPSS and CICS. 

Another solution from IBM in the fraud detection space has been recently highlighted by David Luckham in his site citing a Forbes article.   This solution is based on the "Entity Analytics" solutions (specifically the Infosphere Identity Insights product.    David Luckham comments "that are a lot of CEP under the hood of  this stuff".  This is true.    After the acquisition of SRD by IBM, our team in IBM Haifa Research Lab helped integrating our work on Amit as embedded part in the Entity Analytics -  (see the DEBS 2010 presentation by Ella Rabinovich on Industry Experience with Amit - slide 3).   This integration seems to have survived all these years and being employed for useful purposes. 

In any event,  there are many solutions in which event processing is integrated with other technology to create specific solution, and we can see alliances between event processing technology and other technology in this area.