Congrats to StreamBase and Mark Palmer!

Normally we give a warm congrats to folks when they join a new company.

However, in the case of Mark Palmer joining StreamBase as the new President and COO, I must commend and congratulate StreamBase on hiring a very capable and fantastic leader.   

Mark, don’t forget to update your LinkedIn profile when you get some free time  🙂

IBM Says Business Event Processing is Not CEP

Sandy Carter, IBM’s vice president of SOA and WebSphere strategies, said something in IBM Buys AptSoft To Boost BPM-SOA Line I completely agree with, relative to most of the technologies folks are calling “CEP” these days:

“In the marketplace today, everybody talks about complex event processing,” Carter said. “We actually are trying to rename that category, because we believe the real value is in business event processing, with a focus on the business.”

For example, none of the current CEP vendors are doing “complex event processing” as many of us have said, repeatedly.

TIBCO and AptSoft, for example, are examples of companies that are really implementing, business event processing. You can easily confirm this in TIBCO’s press release, TIBCO BusinessEvents 2.2 now shipping…, where Paul Vincent blogs:

The main change with this [TIBCO BusinessEvents 2.2] release is the inclusion of new deployment options:

+ deploy BusinessEvents within a BusinessWorks container: great for using BusinessEvents as a decision engine for SOA integration processes, choreography, transaction flow monitoring, etc, or for using BusinessWorks as a ruleflow tool.

+ deploy BusinessEvents as a BusinessWorks container: great for exploiting SOA orchestration and services under the control of CEP, such as invoking complex adapters.

This is absolutely, “business event processing” just as IBM’s Sandy Carter stated, correctly in my opinion, not CEP.

The same is true for event stream processing (ESP). ESP technology from companies like Apama, Coral8 and StreamBase, is much more closely aligned with the “business event processing” than anything that is truly CEP.

BAM Solutions for CEP Engine Users

Today I noticed that SL Corporation has revamped their website with a new page, Solutions for CEP Engine Users.    The page is well written, reinforcing some of my earlier posts on the value proposition for CEP; so I hope the folks at SL don’t mind if I repost their excellent thoughts on BAM and CEP here. 

Solutions for CEP Engine Users by SL Corporation

© 1999-2008 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation. All rights reserved.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a relatively new technology that is used to help companies detect both opportunities and threats in real-time with minimal coding and reusable key performance indicators (KPIs) and business models. Just as services are shared and reused in a SOA, CEP permits the sharing and reuse of KPIs in business activity monitoring while efficiently processing events so businesses can act on situations that impact business and take advantage of real-time processing.

Business activity monitoring, often referred to as BAM, is the capability that Gartner and other distinguished analysts use to describe this visualization capability in the business world. BAM introduces a human element to CEP. It is well-established that the human mind is, today and for the foreseeable future, far superior to machine intelligence in making sense out of complicated situations and events. Therefore, BAM is critical to the success of any complex event processing (CEP) solution.

Depending on an organization’s mission, BAM can be used in various levels within an event processing solution to help users visualize and understand the dynamics behind rapidly changing situations and critical business events. In other words, BAM plays a key role wherever there is a need for better insight into the myriad events that effect your business operations.

BAM provides real-time visualization and alerting capabilities for users to better understand how business events impact their organization. BAM software permits users to quickly prototype, build and deploy event processing business solutions. For example, a telecommunications company would find BAM useful to achieve event-driven SLA monitoring and management; and a large retailer would find BAM important as they stay on top of business-critical events in their supply chain.

Insight gained from BAM, in concert with event processing solutions, enable organizations to make better and faster business decisions so they can rapidly sense and respond to threats, problems and opportunities. BAM solutions permit applications to be designed, deployed and modified rapidly with minimal or no coding resulting in significantly lower development costs. Therefore, a key benefit of BAM in real-time event processing solutions is that KPIs can be deployed, monitored, revised, reused and utilized, economically and rapidly.

Depending on the business application, BAM-enabled visualization is required at numerous levels in an event processing architecture. For example, events from across the enterprise are typically processed by a CEP software platforms from companies such as TIBCO, BEA (soon to be Oracle), Progress Apama, StreamBase, Aleri, and Coral8.

Long before KPIs are displayed to the business users, BAM tools can be configured to assist application developers to monitor and visualize the raw event stream. For the developer, their business is developing applications, and BAM can be very useful when designing KPIs for event processing applications.

Fine-tuned KPIs that have been derived from an event processing application are displayed to the business user. These KPIs can indicate risks, threats, problems, opportunities and other emerging business situations that impact the business.

BAM, in concert with state-of-the-art event processing software, provides the framework for a complete sense-and-respond capability for businesses. Processing raw events and event streams for business opportunities and threats requires robust and rapidly deployable visualization solutions. This is the reason that many distinguished analysts believe that BAM and CEP are complementary and critically interdependent core business capabilities. We at SL Corporation agree, and are pleased to be the leading BAM visualization platform in the event processing/CEP ecosystem today.

© 1999-2008 Sherrill-Lubinski Corporation. All rights reserved.

StreamBase and the Progress Apama Trademark

Today I logged into to the blog-o-sphere to read this polite, but shocking, post by Chris Martins, Progress Apama,  The Power of the Apama Name.   

The post is shocking to me because it appears that StreamBase was blatantly abusing and violating the Apama trademark in a Google Adsense marketing campaign.

I find this hard to believe, and wonder if someone else, not StreamBase, was actually running this Adsense campaign.   I cannot imagine StreamBase doing something so ethically and legally wrong; and hope that what we are seeing is an attack on StreamBase’s integrity and not an actual Adsense campaign by StreamBase.

From a legal perspective, StreamBase is liable for any loss of business or damages to Progress by wilfully violating the Apama trademark.

Frankly speaking, if StreamBase was responsible for this Adsense campaign memorialized in Chris’ post, then StreamBase owes Apama, at a minimum, a public apology. 

Apama: Fraud Detection and Heat Maps

A few days ago in Visualization Reloaded I touched upon the subject of heat maps.  In that post the application context was monitoring a massively parallel online gaming platform using a combination of event processing technologies by StreamBase and SL

Today, I was reminded of another heat map created by Progress Apama during a leisurely morning viewing of a Fox Business New video interview with John Bates.  This time the context is the detection of patterns of insider trading.  

In this graphic above (click the image for a larger view) Apama uses a heat map to visualize suspicious trading activity in real time.   Also, you might be interested to know that the cool heat map in this use case is based on the event processing visualization platform by SL Corporation, similar to the heat map in this use case by StreamBase, Simultronics and SL.

Amazingly, in the Fox Business interview John mentions an interesting statistic.   During certain business situations, like mergers and acquisitions, experts have estimated that up to 30 percent of trading activity can be linked to insider trading.   The event processing goal, of course, is to detect fraud sooner than later, minimizing fraudulent market transactions and their influence on the market.

CEP/EP Reference Customers 2005-2007

On November 8th 2007, after compiling a list of CEP/EP reference customers from the open literature and public press releases, I issued a call for CEP reference customers in the Yahoo! CEP-Interest Group and on the professional networking site LinkedIn. During the past 7 weeks I provided an opportunity for all concerned to view and respond to my public worksheet.

Here are the results of the “CEP/EP Reference Customers Survey” for 2005-2007:

Apama	5
TIBCO	5
StreamBase	4
AptSoft	4
Coral8	2
Aleri	2
Agent Logic	1
BEA	1
Total CEP/EP Reference Customers (2005-2007)	25

~~~

Looking only at 2007, the total CEP/EP reference customers available in the public domain were as follows:

~~~

Apama	4
StreamBase	4
TIBCO	2
AptSoft	2
Coral8	2
Aleri	2
Agent Logic	1
BEA	1
Total CEP/EP Reference Customers (2007)	18

~~~

The criteria for inclusion in the survey were based on the following marketing and sales criteria (purely marketing criteria, not technical):

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– Must be a (CEP/EP) software vendor;
– Must be an end user / customer;
– Must NOT be a partnership or OEM announcement;
– Must mention complex event processing (CEP) or event processing (EP) in the public statement; and,
– Reference must be available on the Internet and in English

~~~

Based on the results of this public survey, comments received, and experiences with the actual products by end users, I plan to followup with The CEP Blog Event Processing Awards for 2007.

~~~

Please stay tuned!