Cloud Integration Needs to be Better, Faster and Cheaper

May 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Massimo PezziniGartner’s Massimo Pezzini spoke this morning at the AADI Conference in London on the topic of why integration is even more critical in the ever-expanding world of cloud computing. Pezzini started out by commenting that application integration was a science that we were finally beginning to master just as the game changed with the arrival of cloud computing. With this game change comes new realities and consequences for cloud services integration (CSI) that Pezzini laid out as follows:

Realities

  • Your organization plays in one or more “virtual enterprises”
  • Cloud services (e.g. SaaS) hold some of your data
  • Cloud services manage “chunks” of some of your business processes
  • Your application portfolio will include both on-premise and cloud apps

Consequences

  • You wil have to increasingly share data with your partners and participate in their business processes (and vice versa)
  • Your data will be fragmented across cloud and on-premise
  • Your end-to-end processes will span cloud and on-premise

He followed up this foundation for his discussion with what he described as the three key issues facing businesses looking to integrate cloud and on-premise applications: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Cloud, Integration Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why You Should Be in Control When it Comes to Shopping

April 5, 2013 by 1 Comment
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When it comes to shopping, today’s consumers are in control, with more choices and more options than ever before. It is no longer enough to offer a good selection of merchandise at an attractive price because customers want “experiences” to go with the products they buy.

The cutthroat competition among retailers to give “everyday low prices” has become an everyday norm. The inventory management revolves around the whole concept of keeping the customers satisfied and in turn, “happy.” The happy customer is the loyal fan and will keep coming back.

Word of “Like”

Technology is impacting our everyday lives from the time we get up to the time we sleep. These technological social tools are not just available to us, as they are available to the retailers as well, from social media to online promotions to business analytics.

Word of mouth is what used to go around a few years back when it came to discuss some brand or a retail store. It used to be a close knit group of friends and family only then. With technology touching every part of our lives now, we trust “likes” and shares on social media sites. Instead of talking one on one with friends about a new product at a particular store, we read the reviews of hundreds of strangers giving their valuable feedback. Companies must now keep up with the technology as 140 characters sent out in a few seconds could ruin their reputation. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Retail Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Cool News: Customer Feedback Moves TIBCO Spotfire to Gartner Leader Quadrant for 2013

February 8, 2013 by 1 Comment
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What moved Spotfire to a Leaders position in the 2013 Business Intelligence and Analytics Magic Quadrant from Gartner, Inc.?

While you’ll need to review the entire report to see all the details, we can share a few highlights and insights as to why Spotfire customer feedback helped move the product into the Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant Leaders category.

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First, it’s important to know how the survey works. Gartner defines vendors in the Business Intelligence and Analytics Magic Quadrant as having “a software platform that delivers 15 capabilities across three categories: integration, delivery and analysis.”

Gartner surveyed just over 1,700 current business intelligence and analytics platforms in late 2012 to compile the Magic Quadrant (MQ) report.

Second, it’s important to note how critical this report is in the decision-making process when companies are selecting business intelligence or data discovery vendors.

Because it’s based on customer surveys, vendor surveys and client inquiries to Gartner, decision makers view the report as an important tool in the final decision-making process. Gartner uses this tool to give enterprises a broader view of the industry and the top players in it.

Customer survey data is a key factor for Gartner’s ranking. The direct feedback from customers helped drive Spotfire into the Leaders category.

So, now that we’ve explained how the report is compiled and used, here’s an overview of what helped move Spotfire’s data discovery software to the Leaders category. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Spotfire, Tech Trends Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Integration #FAIL – Part Four: Don’t Let the Bus Leave Without the Passengers

February 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Don’t let the bus leave without the passengersIt is a huge fail to only consider the technology aspect when making any large-scale operational change like integration. And it’s all too common: a big project is approached solely from a technology, IT perspective without full adoption by the business users and ends up being taken for granted. There is a problematic disconnect when you hear, “Haven’t we been doing this already?” which is indicative of unclear communication and worse — complete lack of understanding of any new capabilities.

Why does this happen?

We forget that even technology initiatives like integration are always just as much about the people as the new tech. Ignoring buy-in from key people across the organization breeds resistance to change with people protecting their own interests.

Properly implemented integration gives an organization the ability to build on its skills, to expose information from systems to accelerate processes and leverage events for better operational efficiency that are lost if not used correctly. With the people disconnected from the capabilities of the new tech, this investment is wasted in favor of more of the same. We often hear about skilled engineers who return to their old habits when push comes to shove. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Cloud, Integration Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Decision Latency… Just Part of the Same Problem as Data & Process Latency

July 13, 2012 by 1 Comment
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Interesting read from Gartner’s Jim Sinur, talking about decision and action latency. Jim’s talks about how Big Data is meant to solve decision latency – but it’s not at all clear how or why Big Data affects the latency of either designing or making decisions. Surely Big Data is about extractable information for improving the quality of decisions? Maybe I missed something critical in the Big Data hype. If anything, running analytics on larger data sets is sure to increase latency rather than reduce it! Of course, this is why real-time analytics are increasingly important to complement the traditional data analytics…

I would, however, agree that decision, data and process latency are key weapons in the fight against the costs of Big Data; you want to respond effectively to events as they occur, despite those event rates increasing: that means efficient decision engines, high performance data access, as well as responsive process engines. [Read more...]

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

Are IBM and Oracle Stuck in the 20th Century?

January 31, 2012 by 1 Comment
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Interesting advice to CIOs, although not surprising to us at TIBCO, analyst Dennis Gaughan heavily criticized IBM and Oracle for relying on maintaining profit margins rather than trying to better serve their customers through innovation. At a Gartner Symposium, he said “IBM pitches itself as a thought leader with marketing campaigns such as ‘Smarter Planet’… [but] focused on contract negotiation – understanding the terms and variability of what is licensed, what is negotiable, whether multi-year discounts are available, and whether the CIO can leverage a large IT spend to get a good deal. The number one question is: how do you avoid being managed by IBM?”

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Automation, Event Processing, general, Transform Tagged With: , , ,

Rules are Dead… Long Live Rules (and Events)…

May 18, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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Gartner’s David McCoy recently posted on his frustrations with the idea of “business rules” – or at least some prevalent ambivalency towards the management of rules:

<<I’m beginning to think that most people DO NOT CARE about business rules… So, is it any reason we haven’t seen more uptake of Business Rule Management? No. I think the story is clear. BRM isn’t sexy. It’s not even something that people want. It’s a necessary evil in too many eyes. … >>

He adds some exceptions, though:

<<We’ll just let those of us who know the power of rule-driven behavior benefit from BRM …. Those of us who know, know things like this:

Rules + events = real-time reaction
Rules + scenario analysis = policy-driven agility
Rules + process = mutable processes that stay within bounds
Rules + applications = rapid adaption to new opportunities>>

Of course, different people have different understandings of rules. The “business rule gurus” talk about rules that to many are more like policy or regulations – i.e. constraints on the business like “A Driver of a Vehicle must have a valid Driver’s License”. While documenting and communicating such rules allow good governance, as well as providing useful input as requirements to an IT project, you can see why such efforts could be construed as “not something people want” per Gartner.

On the other hand, decision rules – determining either facts or actions – are what drives businesses (e.g. the sorts of rules one usually associates with “real-time reaction” and so forth).

Therefore it was interesting to read from John Hall on the EU Ontorule research project when he posted about a Decision Oriented Business Applications workshop to take place this year; I’d understood that Ontorule had been about mapping SBVR vocabularies and (policy-like) rules to production rules executed in a rules engine.

<<One change that has occurred since the [Ontorule] project [researching operationalising rules and ontologies] started is the growth of decision management and modelling…>>

So when analysts complain about the lack of take-up of “business rules”, I suspect they are really talking about SBVR-type rule repositories (which remain useful for governance, but are not yet used to support many IT projects today). “Decision rules” as used in Business Processes, and the management of said decisions, remain a hot topic and bridges the business vocabulary world with the IT execution world. And event-based decisions provide the real-time reactions that businesses are increasingly concerned about…

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

EbizQ interview with Gartner’s Roy Schulte on Boosting Operational IQ

April 20, 2011 by 1 Comment
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Good to see ebizQ interviewing Gartner’s Roy Schulte on the value of CEP to applications’ operational intelligence (as we call it) or IQ (as Roy calls it). Makes me wonder if Gartner is developing an IQ metric for organisations based on their agility, responsiveness, etc through exploiting technologies like CEP. I guess that would be a kind of IT Business Maturity Model…

Anyone interested in reading more on Roy’s views would be recommended to check out the book “Event Processing – Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies” he co-authored with Prof Mani Chandy.

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

MWDA on Process Intelligence and Gartner on Business Process Improvement

February 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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mwd-on-piTIBCO has a virtual booth at the MWD Advisors Process Intelligence virtual event, covering TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM Spotfire (which might also win the award for the longest product name) – which does visual and predictive analytics on your process information – and TIBCO BusinessEvents (i.e. CEP) – which does real-time event analytics, monitoring, and dynamic process control…

The MWDA webinar (in 2 parts) is quite interesting and worth a look: their model of Process Intelligence is layered in 3 parts:

  • strategy level: goals, motivations, metrics
  • process level: BPMN, CEP patterns, analytic models
  • reaction level: decision rules and analytics

From a TIBCO perspective, ActiveMatrix BPM and ActiveMatrix BPM Spotfire cover the metrics, process models and analytics side, with BusinessEvents covering the real-time metrics, dynamic processes, CEP, event-based analytics and decisions. One interesting possibility is to use the BusinessEvents’ state models for strategic goal planning too.

Meanwhile, the Gartner guys are also pushing the “Business Process Improvement” button, releasing a report threatening doom and gloom for organisations who do not control their processes. They talk about:

  • undetected but detectable process errors: this being the case for process monitoring and analytics, presumably. Either that or good old business analysis!
  • “context awareness” to rejuvenate commodity processes: context being of course state, or what events tell you!

Note that the MWD event sponsors other than TIBCO (a CEP company) are Progress (also mentioning CEP capabilities) and SoftwareAG (again,  also mentioning CEP capabilities). So it could be an interesting year for BPM-CEP convergence?

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

Real time processes for business…

July 15, 2010 by Leave a Comment
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Two more links of interest to the event processing community:

A Goal of Greater Agility with BPM: The audience was keen to hear about the inclusion of complex events processing, business rules management, unstructured processes, process snippets and social technologies in the evolving BPM technologies. Japan has been a leader in standard processes for a long time and there is a need to make new and dynamic processes.

I see a continued differentiation in products here: for example, TIBCO AMX BPM is a very strong contender in the “conventional BPM” stakes, whereas the TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP tool us more for extreme performance, exception-riddled, unstructured (a.k.a. non-orchestrated) rule-driven operations… but of course these technologies can work together as needed.

Using BPM to improve auto adjudication for claims validation, routing, eligibility check and payment submission can deliver huge gains.

This time it seems it is not CEP that is being confused (or conflated into) BPM, but business rules and decisions. Claim validation? Rules. Routing? Rules. Eligibility check? Rules. Payment submission? Ah – that could be a business process! And real-time rules are another term for event-driven rules… meaning, again, event processing.

Of course, this is not really “heresy” against the BPM community. The fact is that the term “business process” can be viewed as being much wider than the current BPM community – is not the detection of some event pattern a kind of process? In an agent that is matching events to decisions an event-driven process?


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