On mobile phones and standards

Today I received a new mobile phone, since one of our family's mobile phone was broken, we did some shifting around, and it was my turn to get a new one. Starting to work with it was somewhat frustrating, I found myself in unknown territory, although it was produced by the same vendor of the old phone, they did not succeed to move the ringtones from my previous phone (although I purchased them in their store), since there is no standard for ringtones and each instrument represents it differently so they gave me a credit to get free ringtones from their store. They succeeded to move the list of my contact persons (there is a standard for that), but not the different groups defined for the contact person (no standard), the user interface is totally different, and requires some learning and more.

I have changed laptops several times in the last few years, and the transition was smooth, everything just worked -- no need to study anything new.

In our world of event processing we are not in better shape then in mobile phones, actually we are worse. In the event processing course that I have been teaching this semester, the students had a task to study six languages (each team has its own languages) and on Monday they will present the result of their experiments. I thought about it when struggling with the phone, if one of them was in the team that studied language X in the course, and tomorrow they find themselves working with another language, this might be somewhat confusing for them. In the course I am teaching our building block approach, which is valid for all languages. Working with standard oriented software is easier, we still have a challenge here.

Requiem to a small yellow cat

The small yellow cat adopted by my daughter a year ago passed away today. Eight days ago we realized he is sick and took him to the veterinary clinic, where they diagnosed that he was attacked by a violent virus, which his immune system could not handle. We were told that he'll probably last for 2 months or so, but it seems that this has been over-estimate. He had short life, only a little more than a year, but had a good life relative to his peers that live in the street. I have never been a cat fan, but over the last year he became part of the family, and was very attached to Hadas, my third daughter, he was very sad every time she has been away from home for a few days. For some strange reason the battery in my watch went dead at the same time he died, and my watch stopped. I have already replaced the battery, replacing a living creature will be more difficult, but we might adopt a new kitten after my daughter will get over...

More on intrapreneuring

This picture is taken from a NY Times article entitled "who says innovation belongs to the small" showing some system developed in IBM Research dealing with traffic analysis, this article was quoted in Mark Palmer's Blog saying that "Big companies can innovate if they act small". Mark is right, I have dealt with intrapreneuring for years, and recently even talked briefly about it in an internal talk I have given to an internal audience in IBM Haifa Research Lab about the internal recoginition we received. In my previous posting about intrapreneuring, I have quoted the original ten commandments that Pinchot, the person invented this term, has established; Mark mentions them in his Blog as well, however, recently I got Pinchot's follow-up book, "Intrapreneuring in action", and found out that he has somewhat changed the 10 commandments, some were changed, and some were changed order (assuming that the order says something on importance", so for all fans of intrapreneuring here are the revised 10 commandments:

1. Remember, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission

2. Do any job needed to make your project work, regardless of your job description

3. Come to work each day willing to be fired

4. Recruit a strong team.

5. Ask for advice before resources.

6. Forget pride of authorship, spread credit widely

7. When you bend the rules, keep the best interests of the company and it customers in mind

8. Honor your sponsors

9. Underpromise and overdeliver

10. Be true to your goals, but realistic about ways to achieve them.

Some comments:

• The current first commandment has been promoted from being the 8th in the old list; my experience indeed shows that this is the most useful advice.
• "Recruit a strong team" is new, there was similar one with longer phrasing.
• "Ask for advice before resources" is also a new one
• "Forget pride of authorship" is also a new one, emphasizing the team game.
• #7 is also new one, though I have to say that "best interests" is a very subjective term.
• #9 is also new.
  
  

Some commandments that disappeared. but I thought they are useful:

• Work underground as long as you can – publicity triggers the corporate immune mechanism.
• Never bet on a race unless you are running in it.

And still, the immune mechanism of big corporates is not an easy line to cross, I have also been in a small company, it has other issues, however being entrepreneur is definitely easier than being intrapreneur.

On predictive, anticipative and proactive enterprise

As a skeptic person, I am not a big believer in astrology, but follows it from time to time; twice in my life the astrology predictive for the year for me was that there is going to be career shift in the next year, and twice it really happened, but this is still not a scientific evidence. Anyway, astrology is a kind of prediction source, but there are other sources like business intelligence tools. Richard Veryard in his Blog has recently written that the enterprise need to go beyond predictive, in the sense that the enterprise needs not only to passively predict the future, but also taking action in advance to the future, he used the term: anticipative for this kind of functionality.

First, I agree with the observation. One of the next frontiers is to go beyond predictive from BI point of view, as well as reactive from event processing point of view. I prefer the term proactive rather then anticipative to what Richard has described.

Some comments about the distinctions between predictive and proactive:

1. predictive typically relates to the strategic level --- watch trends and change the inventory policy; proactive may relate to operative --- anticipate that something in the operative level may happen (e.g. massive water leakage from the pipe infrastructure) and do something to mitigate it.
2. predictive typically collects data over long period of time, processes it in batch, and apply it periodically, or on request; proactive works in short-term, sometimes with time constraints.

Proactive may be seen as evolution both of BI and of event processing.

More about proactive -- later.

Are event processing technologies applicable for static data?

An interesting question was asked by Hans Gilde to one of my previous posts, "You focus on EP for moving data, but I wonder what you have found as fas as using the concepts for stored events".

The fact that I am concentrating on event processing is true, I would not equate "event" with "moving data", since event has some semantic meaning of something that happens, and has some time dimensions associated with it, so I would classify is as a kind of moving data, some moving data are not events.

There are indeed some benefits to use event processing concepts over stored data, I'll talk about one aspect which is the notions of pattern and context.

An expression like:

The vehicle moving in consistent direction south within the temporal context that starts with surveillance start and ends with vehicle stops partitioned by vehicle.

This is (more or less -- it should be done with a visual language rather than textual) a combination of pattern and context. This is somewhat easier than writing the same in SQL. There were attempts to mix SQL and patterns, but keeping the SQL semantics makes it somewhat complex. If we can use such a language, programming may be easier, this can be translated to SQL in the background.

There are some other benefits to use EP concepts for databases as well as for messaging systems, BRMS, and other related technologies.

On another matter: I am reading with interest Mark Palmer's nine predictions for the future of event processing, I promise a review after he'll finish to write all nine (now he is in #3).

More - Later.

What's coming in 2010 for the event processing community?

While we celebrated our new year in September, we are using the Gregorian calendar as our civil calender for any practical use. I am still not sure exactly what will be my own focus in 2010, the equation has too many free variables right now, hope to instantiate some of them soon.

This is the time to say something about what is planned for the event processing community, here are collection of items, not necessarily complete, and not necessarily in order of importance:

• OMG plans to launch "event processing consortium" similar to the SOA or BPM consortia, this will concentrate on the business/application side of event processing. I'll write more about it as concrete plans will become public
• We shall hold a Dagstuhl seminar about event processing in May. This is a forum to which the leading persons in a certain area are invited for a 5 days retreat in an isolated place, the goal will be to work on "event processing manifesto". I'll probably write more about it in time.
• The main research conference of the EP community, DEBS, is now ACM conference (starting 2009) and will take place in Cambridge, UK.
• The EPTS annual symposium will return to the USA, probably in the west coast in the 4th quarter. More details to come.
• More event processing books to come -- the Event Processing in Action book, by Peter Niblett and myself will be out around May 2010. In the pipeline there is also a new book by David Luckham about event processing applications.
• EPTS work-groups will have further results: A new version of the glossary, a summarizing paper of the language analysis work-group, more from other work-groups as well.
• More workshops specific to the interaction of event processing with other disciplines are likely to happen more (e.g. event-driven BPM, event based functionality in robotics - already occurred this year).

As for the business side, I'll leave the predictions to analysts, but we'll see more business growth and more awareness of this area, maybe additional start-ups emerge, maybe more acquisitions will occur, maybe some development we cannot see now. Hope for an interesting and fruitful year.

2009 - event processing perspectives

2009 is going away soon, and it is time to summarize it from the event processing perspective, which is the focus of this Blog.

According to analysts this has been a good year for event processing, in tough economic climate, the accumulative market for event processing continued to grow, more or less according to the original predictions, and is expected to continue the substantial growth. Here are ten statements about event processing in 2009.

1. In the vendors world, Microsoft has announced a forthcoming product, Software AG notified that it is working on a product, and more start-ups have joined the area; the most notable acquisition this year is the acquisition of Coral8 by Aleri that was not an intuitive acquisition.
2. In my own company, IBM -- besides Websphere Business Events (WBE) that was launched in 2008 and is growing rapidly in 2009 in number of customers, IBM announced three more products in this area in 2009: Infosphere Streams, Websphere Sensor Events, and EDA extension for CICS, as IBM believes in having event processing capabilities pervasive throughout its software portfolio
3. The emergence of new book. The first book in this area that has made a big impact was David Luckham's "Power of events". Eight year have passed with Luckham's book as a single book in this area. In 2009 several more books have been published, most notable the book by Chandy and Schulte. Some more books are due in 2010
4. Some popular magazines ran articles about event processing, one of them is International Journal of Banking Systems, and the other is IEEE Computer.
5. All major analysts had special reports on event processing. Gartner has written about it before, but now made it explicit part of its "hype cycle"; Forrester made a thorough report with comparison among several products over multiple criteria.
6. The major scientific conference of event processing DEBS has been endorsed by ACM and became ACM DEBS conference. The conference made a shift over the last couple of years from "pub/sub" conference to a larger event processing conference. EPTS provided two tutorials: languages and use cases
7. Other event processing related workshops interacting event processing with other areas were: event-driven business process management, or event-based processing in robotics. These two topics have been discussed in the annual EPTS meeting that was held in Trento.
8. it is announced that Streambase will receive the "world economic foundation" award, an indication that event processing is considered as one of the influential technologies for the world economy.
9. Another winner of the same award is Twitter. This year different applications that processing Twitter events have emerged.
10. The quote of the year comes from Alex Buchmann, in his Keynote address in DEBS 2010: regular programming is like drinking with a straw, this is good when the data is standing, while the data is moving, like in event processing, using the same kind of thinking is similar to use a straw to drink from a waterfall.

Something about what's coming in 2010 -- later.