Sadly I missed Brenda Michelson, the Apama crew, and Joe McKendrick’s recent EBizQ webinar discussion on CEP. However, Brenda’s blog on the event has a nice diagram of what is described as the “Active Information Tier”. This has outputs as (informed) actions and decisions affecting (business…) now and tomorrow respectively, with the now part also being combined with the past (via BI, inferred from the text) to create actions for tomorrow.

Basically the top half of the diagram covers what we at TIBCO call “Operational Intelligence” (and neatly explains why decision management and complex event processing should be treated better than merely bedfellows, also the topic of recent IBM talk), and the bottom half “Business Intelligence“. These halves are represented in the TIBCO stack by TIBCO BusinessEvents and TIBCO Spotfire respectively. One extra angle here is the role of analytical methods that apply conventionally to the business history part to discover new data patterns, but also (per our thesis) to the short-term event tier to discover new event patterns – and thence improve the real-time decisions attached to the active information bus – sorry – tier.