So how is CEP performing in the market?

December 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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TIBCO had their 4th quarter analyst call last week, and SeekingAlpha’s transcript has a few CEP mentions for TIBCO’s Q4 and 2011 FY:

  • “Our business optimization category, which includes both BusinessEvents and Spotfire, grew over 50% in license revenue for the year and has doubled in the past 2 years.”
  • “Business optimization was the clear growth driver this quarter, up 45% over last Q4. Both Spotfire and BusinessEvents, which make up this category, showed tremendous growth, and each had its largest quarter ever. BusinessEvents is also playing a larger and larger role in our platform sales, and therefore making up a larger and larger percentage of revenue on many deals.”
  • “…everybody is moving into an eventing engine. And some people — we have clients that are actually replacing app servers with event servers. …”
  • “It seems like the world is moving more and more to intelligent systems and driving intelligent outcomes in various verticals. “
  • “…so everybody wants to completely go to the eventing platform if you’re a retailer. … Everybody wants to be able to go all the way down to the consumer. They want to be able to make you the offer before you leave the aisle, not 6 months after you leave the store. … so Macy’s was an early TIBCO adopter to go to this eventing platform. And I think their results have shown it. …”
  • “One of the use cases we’re very excited about is for cybersecurity where people are now trying to look at events and anticipate that there might be trouble. And the — what we did in the government is now all of a sudden of interest everywhere. And in addition to our technology now being built into the smart grid, they’re using the cybersecurity component because once you have a smart grid, it can be hacked and that’s not so good. So we have some fantastic use cases around that. …”
Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: , , , , ,

Rent-A-Center Invests Heavily in IT Infrastructure and Hits a 52 Week High in Their Stock Price: Coincidence, or ROI?

December 20, 2011 by 1 Comment
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A news item that caught our attention today concerns Rent-A-Center, whose stock price hit a 52-week high. We tip our hats to a company whose forward-thinking and visionary ways have made it a leader in the highly competitive rent-to-own industry.

True to its commitment to invest in people, technology and processes, Rent-A-Center took another big step this year to make information management a priority, embracing Master Data Management (MDM) as a key initiative. Its MDM program enables all Rent-a-Center employees to access shared data that help them better manage customers, from identifying risky accounts to upselling to monitoring the changes in their customers’ lives that could drive future rentals.

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Filed Under: Automation, Loyalty, MDM Tagged With: , , , ,

Multi-threaded CEP, and going live with POCs

December 13, 2011 by 3 Comments
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Two of many interesting tidbits of news from last weeks internal TIBCO  meetings were:

  • TIBCO competed against a C/C++-based CEP product normally seen in Financial Services Front Office applications (i.e. extreme low latency applications). But because TIBCO BusinessEvents could effectively exploit the tested multi-threading / multi-core system, its throughput proved vastly better. Perhaps the Financial Services Front Office folk are missing a trick here?
  • One fascinating project involved a Proof Of Concept (POC) that processed 500M events in 4 days, achieving up to 75K events per sec using 11 agents deployed to a 24 core server, with business control via decision tables. What surprised me was that the POC was inserted into a live operational business system – how about that for faith (or rather, reliability)!
Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP)

Cyber Attacks On the Rise: Are Mission Critical System at Risk?

December 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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ShellImagine a bunch of hackers plotting to destroy a large oil production facility. As they finish their code, they become increasingly giddy about the havoc they’re about to unleash. From here, it’s point, click, attack. The facility is in flames, lives are lost, and the price of crude jumps manifold.

No, this isn’t a scene out of a bad sci-fi flick; it’s the new reality of cyber attacks. BBC reported Shell saying at a conference today that the oil giant is seeing more and more cyber attacks on its mission-critical systems. Since computers control nearly all the world’s energy production and distribution, the consequences of large-scale cyber attacks can be monumental—and even fatal.

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The CEP Market at the end of 2011

December 6, 2011 by 4 Comments
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cep-market-dec2011The previous CEP Market review earlier this year had a few suggestions for new entries: so we ‘ve updated the chart with what data we could find. Hope this is useful.

Note: please comment on this post any suggested changes, births, deaths and marriages in the event processing tooling market, and I’ll incorporate the changes in the next version.

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: ,

2SA

December 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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connectthedotsSome folks may have noticed some changes in the TIBCO corporate website, including various references to some of the TLAs in the above expression:

  • 2-Second Advantage or 2SA: a business competitive enabler, achieved by exploiting E3.
  • Event Enabled Enterprise or E3: an IT compliance requirement for real-time business support, requiring a number of IT capabilities.
  • Messaging / Event Bus / etc: the plumbing needed to deliver events around a business (~ as they happen).
  • Au(tomation)*: the basic IT building blocks of BPM, SOA, MDM, etc.
  • Event Processing or EP: matching / extracting the necessary event patterns as they occur (also mostly solving the problem of Big Data exploitation).
  • An(alytics)*: extracting actionable information from data / big data.
  • Cl(oud)*: flexible extensible deployment mechanisms.
  • So(cial)*: corporate (human) knowledge exploitation in real-time.

Notes: * = unreasonable abbreviations, of course. Please don’t confuse this with a chemistry experiment.

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: , ,

DMN: promoting decision-based software

December 3, 2011 by 2 Comments
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Last week TIBCO hosted the first Face2Face meeting of the decision modelling / management experts from FICO, IBM and Oracle representing one of the submission teams for the OMG Decision Model and Notation standard. Although we cannot divulge any details of the meeting results, suffice to say that progress was considered as “good” by all concerned… publication (to OMG) of the first draft of this and the other submissions is due in May 2012.

From an event processing perspective, current decision-based methodologies mostly focus on the “decision as a service” (DaaS?) type models and associated stateless executable artifacts – think TIBCO ActiveMatrix Decisions and TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager, and their equivalents Oracle Business Rules, IBM Websphere Ilog JRules, and FICO Blaze Advisor. Here a decision is something that occurs at a point in time, based on data / information valid at the time of decision, with some explicit process required to revisit said decision.

However for event-based decisions, we can also consider decisions as a continuous operation. This is best illustrated by the “decision” made when some event pattern is identified: the pattern may be identified and/or disqualified multiple times for the same entity, based for example on complex and sophisticated business rules (that may themselves be changing over time). A typical mechanism for this might be inference rules (as seen in TIBCO BusinessEvents). I would expect later versions of DMN to be extended to cover rule-based and continuous-evaluation decisions, but DMN version 1 will likely cover the simpler “Decision as a Process Task” role (where “process task” could be a BPMN Business Rule Activity or a dynamic rule-driven activity). The differences in decision models for continuous versus decision-point based decisions is an interesting area for future discussion!

My thanks again to the participants of the F2F for a successful meeting.

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: , , , ,