Alan Lundberg

Alan Lundberg is a well-known author and speaker on Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and has a long track record working with advanced enterprise software products. He was also a founding member of the Event Processing Technical Society and previously worked for some of the seminal AI software companies. Mr. Lundberg received his M.B.A. from Loyola Marymount University.


How Innovation in Retail Will Change Our Lives

March 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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It was during this last holiday season when I first noticed it. While watching TV, an advertisement came on touting Walmart would now price match with competitors. Then, I read in a press release that Best Buy would now price match online competitors as well, presumably to avoid “show rooming,” the phenomena of customers coming in to try out products, then purchasing those same products online. In the context of the retail space, these are some of the biggest gorillas telling the rest of the world they acknowledge things have changed and are ready to change with it. Pretty revolutionary stuff.

The Changing Times

Price matching is just one step for the renovation of the modern retailer. The other major step will have to be customer experience.

Online retailers can offer a price. What they can’t offer are the sights, sounds, smells (hopefully pleasant ones) and sensations of an in-store experience. That being said, this hasn’t stopped them from trying.

Zappos, a successful online store, has incentivized their sales reps to spend MORE time on the phone with customers. The theory is that this extra time spent on the phone will help the company — and the customer — know just a little bit more about each other. So far, it’s working for Zappos.  Sales are off the charts. [Read more...]

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Obama Inauguration – Top 10 Tips to Enlighten the CIO

January 21, 2013 by 1 Comment
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In 2009, as Barack Obama was taking office, I wrote a Top 10 list of things he should do with technology.  Now, on the day of his second inauguration, I wanted to take a retrospective look at my old predictions and add some new ones for the next four years.

Not many folks like to look back and see how their prognostications fared (take note of the ensuing blank stare on the face of any technology analyst you ask).  But I’m going for it… with tongue firmly in cheek.

The original predictions are followed by new predictions for Obama’s new term… and as before, no wagering, please.

10. U.S. Government operations visibility tool for the newly appointed Chief Performance Officer cabinet post

This prediction didn’t pan out as there is still no CPO cabinet post.  In 2013, this should morph into Citizen Experience Officer so Washington gets direct feedback into what the average citizen experiences when dealing with Government agencies or officials.

For job requirements, the new C.E.O. must utilize Medicare for healthcare and contribute to, and depend on Social Security for retirement. Increasingly, there is a precedent – many businesses are using Customer Experience Management implementations with success, so why not try it in Government?

9. A new Presidential dashboard with real power

Obama’s campaign understood the power of Real Time, Social Media and using innovative technology to influence voters, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they would be very interested in a new event-driven government operations dashboard, and make it available as an App, of course. The new one just needs to add a <drone alert> and @N. Korea <del> function. [Read more...]

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

TUCON 2010 CEP Customer Presentations

May 25, 2010 by 1 Comment
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truck-fleetHaving sufficiently had a chance to recover from a very busy and very engaging TUCON TIBCO 2010 user conference in Las Vegas, I wanted to pass along a few observations and notes from my track this year which was the Optimization and Visibility track.  This was a very full 2 days of mostly CEP customer presentations with a smattering of industry IT analysts and TIBCO engineering presentations thrown in for good measure.

I’ll include this as a series and cover one presentation at a time.

First up is PepsiCo, co-presented with their implementation partner, Infosys.

The use case was how PepsiCo uses CEP software to provide more efficient and cost-effective usage of their company transportation fleet and other dedicated transportation partners.

In specific, they wanted to use their CEP software to provide advice on when to use their own transportation fleet, or use another carrier for consumer product shipments all over the U.S.  Previously, Pepsi was using a manual, labor intensive process to manage the process.

In researching this project it was decided that they needed to be able to dynamically deploy their policies (or business rules), and automatically create decision trees to reflect the changing dynamics and costs of the transportation industry, they needed real time information on truck locations and cost valuations, and to capture metrics for performance measurement.

They also covered the architecture and design of their deployed system which was implemented with the Pepsi IT team and Infosys.  He explained how they were able to develop simple and timed events to automate and manage the business rules with the TIBCO rule authoring tool, deploy customized and re-usable processes to extract data from a 3rd Party tool at regular intervals and provide enhanced performance by querying large amount of data as subsets and utilizing XSL and XPATH capabilities within the TIBCO software.

They also wanted to provide the ability to correlate events or create alerts based on events. He described it as “managing their company transportation events”

Example: If xx# errors occur in an hour, then send email to baseline support.

Example: If the Dedicated Fleet carrier has not reviewed their trip within 2 hours of offering, alert the Network Coordinator.

They also covered their business benefits– which included the ability to strategically identify the placement of dedicated and company fleet capacity, scale their fleet best practices nationally, and provide an agile software platform that gives them the flexibility to adapt to change via business rules that require minimum to no code change.

Key learnings from their project included his observation that they were glad they involved the business side early in the project in defining business rules, actions and data elements. PepsiCo also chose to build this CEP solution using iterative methodology principles to in order to keep the business side engaged throughout the project, specifically in the area of User Interface and Rule Authoring.

One of the speakers also covered ROI and payback– but we were sworn to secrecy.

In general, it was a well received presentation by the packed room.

But what I really liked about this particular session was that it presented by the guys who were directly involved and it was to Infosys’ credit that they let the Pepsi guys (and the project’s) success speak for itself.

CEP applications are often touted as to be so cutting edge and revolutionary, but it’s applications such as these “bread and butter” projects that seems to have made a difference in their everyday company operations and sometimes it’s those applications that turn out to be the most important of all.

More customer presentations later …

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

Hi Ho Silver, Away!

June 4, 2009 by 1 Comment
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And with that, TIBCO’s newest offering, Silver is off and running. 

Announced yesterday at the NOWonline show, it seems to be getting a good bit of attention in the press, analyst and blogosphere communities.  eBizQ picked up on the announcement and commented on its use of CEP in the automation of cloud-app-balancing. As for me, my head is a bit cloudy at the moment, from all the fuss.

So what is Silver, and what does it have to do with CEP? 

Everything. 

TIBCO Silver is new software infrastructure for “cloud” computing.  A “Silver” lining for the clouds you might say. 

And why is this important for CEP? 

Because it’s an infrastructure product that embeds a CEP engine in order to solve problems related to governance (managed access, security, privacy and adherence to regulations), and scalability (uses SLAs to automatically scale up / or down as needed).  The kicker is that it’s automatic, so both the governance and the scaling is accomplished inherently through embedded monitoring, management and event-decision-action rules rather than manual intervention and programming -which AFAIK, is an achilles heel for current cloud products being introduced. 

This should be an interesting announcement for developers of different types of Business2Consumer or Consumer2Consumer apps that are likely to vary widely in resource requirements. The embedded governance allows for various levels of authorization, authentication and encryption policies to be dynamically configured. This is important because some services should be open to everyone and some services, well, just shouldn’t.

As in most cloud architectures, and not counting those who simply put the cloud moniker in front of their latest software product, there is no software to install or hardware to procure or provision, which reduces the barrier to develop and deploy rapid IT solutions (whether that’s infrastructure, platform or applications)

TIBCO Silver is currently in Beta. It will be interesting to see the deployments when they start rolling out.

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

CEP and the American Business Awards

May 21, 2009 by Leave a Comment
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Here’s a quick announcement that might be of interest to those of you reading our blog.

We have recently been informed that our most favorite CEP product, TIBCO BusinessEvents, has been nominated, and by virtue of independent judging and votes from the public, has now made it to the Finals of the American Business Awards aka The Stevies.

So if, like me, you have a strong affinity for BE, or would like to see any CEP product gain more positive non-industry exposure, you ought to head over to cast your vote at: http://peopleschoice.stevieawards.com/default.cfm

The category is for – New Product or Service of the Year – Computer Software, New Version: TIBCO CEP BusinessEvents 3.0

Final judging begins today through June 1st. I’m told that the race in these categories is tight and every vote counts.

The ABA plans to publicly announce the winners on Tuesday, June 9. The winners will be invited to attend the 7th annual American Business Awards banquet in New York on Monday, June 22 to accept their special People’s Choice trophy(s).

We will keep you posted on any developments.

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

Alan’s List – Why Obama Needs CEP / BAM

January 13, 2009 by 2 Comments
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With the inauguration of a new US President just around the corner, I’ve been ruminating on the forthcoming changes. It’s not an easy job to begin with, and since there’s so much work to do and he’s got a brand new team, I’m thinking President-elect Obama might be able to use Complex Event Processing and / or Business Activity Monitoring software.

Here’s how… (in the form of a top ten list)

Top 10 Reasons Obama Needs CEP/BAM

10.  A new US Government operations visibility tool for the newly appointed Chief Performance Officer cabinet post.

9.  As a new Presidential dashboard with real power.

8.  Another reason to stick with his Blackberry – TIBCO CEP product BusinessEvents creates Blackberry alerts.

7.  Predict what Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will say and do next.

6.  Choose the new Presidential dog based on historical breed information correlated with new puppy attributes and real-time events.

5.  Automatically rebalance his personal 401K before Bernanke announces FED rate changes.

4.  New Affinity rewards program for frequent taxpayers.

3.  Make sure nobody plays the overnight commodities market with the bailout money float.

2.  Keep an eye on Hillary. As an added bonus, Hillary can use it to keep an eye on Bill.

 

And the number 1 reason…

1.  oBAMa – as in Business Activity Monitoring.

 

That’s what I think, anyway.  How about you?  Let us know.

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

Change in the air? Ask Paris Hilton

October 31, 2008 by Leave a Comment
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Interesting times here at TIBCO and beyond. In fact, it seems like according to the zeitgeist, it’s one of those tumultuous times where everyone is constantly reminded of pending change.

There’s also change of some sort in the political environment coming here in the U.S. I’m not going to take any political stands in this blog, but if you’re familiar with Greg Reemler aka “Greg the Architect” and the folks at Techrotech, they’re also contemplating change too. This one was too good for me not to share.

GregTheArchitect Listens To The Candidates

Lots of reasons for us all to re-evaluate how we cope with change… and CEP interestingly enough can help companies do just that. Recently, we concluded our event processing Online Summit and had the author, blogger and enterprise decision management proponent James Taylor as one of the keynote presenters. We had over 900 attendees listen and ask questions — many of which were along this line — What is the relationship and difference between CEP and BI (real-time and operational BI)?

The most noticeable difference is the event driven, real-time nature of CEP versus the query driven approach of traditional BI tools. CEP, at least in terms of TIBCO’s approach, is declarative which means the presence (or absence) of an event can determine how the business rules fire and ultimately how the system responds to the detected situation. In other words, BI makes you ask questions in order to get an answer and CEP gives you an answer based on real detected events.

CEP could utilize BI or analytics as a source of events or source of rules. You might be able to use BI to query a database to determine rules, but you would be better off applying the rules in real time in a CEP system to take advantage of CEP’s real time nature. This means you can detect fraud when it happens — not after it’s too late.

It’s a fundamental difference that event processing is based on data in motion versus the static “data at rest” in a database. CEP systems can usually detect more event sources and types than traditional BI which relies on a database. That’s the old way of doing things. CEP is also much better at finding out root cause and why something happened: users can drill down from a complex event to find what source events led to that situation (or complex event).

So that’s my story and I’ll stick with it. To those of you dealing with some sort of change, breathe in and hang in there. To those of you in the US, happy election – and make sure to get out and vote, even if it’s for Paris!

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

CEP vs. BRE – A TIBCO TTL (Top Ten List)

August 19, 2008 by 33 Comments
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My colleague, Paul, got lots of… let’s call it, “feedback” regarding his post on the impending demise of the standalone Business Rule Engine (BRE) Market. It seems there are lots of folks out there who feel quite passionate about the subject, so I thought I would continue, albeit from a different angle and relate it back to the CEP and BusinessEvents for comparison.

So… taking my cue from David Letterman and with a tip o’ the hat to Paul, here are the:

Top 10 reasons why TIBCO BusinessEvents (BE) beats a simple Business Rule Engine + JMS layer (remember, no wagering please)

10. BE is Standards-based (for concept/class models, state models, rule models etc)

9. BE requires no app server or RDBMS (for lower cost, and quicker deployment)

8. BE provides multiple options to extend to other event channel types (for flexible complex event processing)

7. BE has Rule / decision management (for business control of software services)

6. BE takes a co-operative agent approach (for co-operating components and event processing services)

5. BE supports high scalability (for parallelizing applications and eXtreme Transaction Processing)

4. BE supports queries as well as rules (for dynamic facts)

3. BE supports State Models as well as rules (for case management, entity lifecycles, etc)

2. BE is designed as a stateful approach (for saving temporal information between messages)

and the number 1 reason is…

1. Real-time event-driven support already built in to the BE rule engine (for efficient Event-Driven Architecture use)

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP)

Intelligent Business Process Platform?

August 4, 2008 by 2 Comments
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Well here’s an interesting post from someone at PWC consulting.

http://www.pwc.com/extweb/home.nsf/docid/FB2EF3AC6E351ECC8525746B00676021

The way he’s presenting it, he appears to have seen the beginnings of an IT nirvana by linking business intelligence, rules and process management together to create a whole new “intelligent business process platform”, although it takes a “heroic effort” – no doubt through extensive services.

He also says that “enterprises that create value through rapid process changes are beginning to define a market opportunity for a preintegrated suite of tools that supports intelligent business performance management.”

I think he’s onto something there. Call us, PWC. We’ll talk.

He also found and interviews someone in SAP to explain how they will be framing these categories as applications that people will adopt similar to the ERP adoption pattern.

Hmmm….

For the former, this begs the question, is BPM a ready made problem for CEP to solve? Or vice versa?

For the SAP position, well… nah, I’m not gonna comment on that one. SAP provides too many customers to companies like TIBCO to solve / and or augment their ERP systems.

What do you think?

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CEP and TUCON – Where Reality Trumps All

May 8, 2008 by 2 Comments
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As I write the last of my event summary reports and follow up action items, I am now officially putting a bow on the TIBCO user conference (TUCON 2008)

What a madhouse. I was accountable for the TIBCO Analyst Summit (TIBCO’s first ever), two days of the Business Optimization track of presentations (combining engineering, customer and analyst presentations) and ensuring that TIBCO CEP BusinessEventsTM booth was staffed and overflowing with interested folks. Add in various podcasts and spokesperson duties for press and customers and it all equaled a stressful, crazed and wholly satisfying event at the same time, if that’s possible.

I met some great folks from all over the world: partners, analysts, customers – in particular, Southwest Airlines and Allstate Insurance – knowledgeable and fine folks in all respects, really pushing the edge of what is possible in IT and event processing.

What I experienced at the conference relative to CEP, was this. It appears that the mainstream messaging, integration and SOA folks are finally getting it and see the value in event driven SOA and are asking for CEP and BusinessEventsTM by name. There is also a groundswell of interest in Business Optimization and some analysts like IDC and other sundry vendors are seeing Business Optimization as the next big thing.

And they’re right. Booyah!.

Quite a few nice posts ended up in the blogosphere that comment on TUCON, SOA, CEP et al – , Sandy Kemsley, Joe McKendrick, Dana Gardner, Tony Baer among others with interesting perspectives.

However, my biggest AHA moment was the realization in listening to our other customers, besides Southwest and Allstate, that some of the greatest applications of CEP are not the big and noticeable “complex” events that marketing folks like to talk about. They are instead using TIBCO BusinessEvents much more low key and pragmatically, like making sure their customers are less irritated or their business can recover quicker from unforeseen circumstances.

I’ll quote my colleague Chris M. when he says “it opens BusinessEvents up to solving common everyday problems which should be easy to do, but for some reason are hard (e.g. Baggage Handling).”

For many of our customers, it’s not overly visible, but it works for them.

And that’s what really matters.

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP)
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