Marc Adler: Analytics are an Integral Part of the CEP Stack

In Recent Buyouts, Marc Adler of Citigroup blogs “Despite what the various pundits of the CEP world say, I still think that analytics are an integral part of the CEP stack.”

Mark also says something else I agree with, “… [TIBCO] Business Events [ … is …] a more workflow-oriented product, something that you would NOT use to pump Level2 quotes through and create algo apps.”

Kudos to Marc!  Very insightful. Keep on blogging!

The Grammar of Complex and Intelligent Events

Folks defining CEP, and now this new term IEP, have been very passionate over the past few years that “Complex Event Processing” means the Processing of “Complex Events” not the “Complex Processing” of Events.   

Grammatically speaking, it follows that Complex is an adjective describing a noun, Event; and Processing is a verb. 

Complex events are defined by the same community as composite events, or events that are composed of two or more “contributing” events.

To be consistent, I think we should follow the same logic and grammar in the discussion of “Intelligent Event Processing”. 

It follows that Intelligent should be an adjective describing a noun, Event; and Processing is a verb.  It also follows that “Intelligent Event Processing” means the Processing of “Intelligent Events” not the “Intelligent Processing” of Events.   

This is precisely the problem that folks are creating a new CEP term, “Intelligent Event Processing” to describe processing capabilitities that are missing from the current suite of self-described CEP software products.   What people really mean to describe is the Intelligent Processing of Complex Events.   However, based on the same grammer used in defining CEP, they have created the Processing of Intelligent Events.

The use of inconsistent grammar and logic is not good for the CEP community, in my opinion.   Just because the current generation of self-described CEP vendors do not rise to the capability required by the vast majority of business event applications, we should not create new terms just to make marketing folks happy.

I think I am in a good position to speak about this, because some of my best friends work for software companies selling self-described CEP software and they have seemingly lost patience  because I refuse to support inconsistent illogical positioning and repositioning of the CEP market.

Why is the grammar between the terms “Complex Event Processing” and “Intelligent Event Processing” inconsistent?.   Folks can only spin and reposition CEP so much before all the spin, hype, and repositioning begins to catch up with the community.   

Dr. David Luckham’s original papers and single book on CEP was clear enough about CEP; and CEP covers the entire space that Opher Etzion would like to reposition as IEP.    The Grammar of Complex and Intelligent Events are, at best, misleading and inconsistent.

I think the main problem is that what Opher has been describing is the Intelligent Processing of Complex Events – however, to say this would affirm what I have been evangelizing for over two years.

TIBCO Leaps Ahead in CEP with Insightful Acquisition

TIBCO Software shows, yet again, why the team in Palo Alto far outpaces the rest of the field with their announced acquisition of Insightful.  

Everyone who follows The CEP Blog and my vision for the business use of CEP understands how much energy and passion I have put into explaining why the crude time-series analysis of streaming data cannot possibly solve the vast majority of complex business problems CEP must address. 

TIBCO’s acquisition of Insightful shows just how serious TIBCO is about working to make the vision of “Predictive Business” a reality.    TIBCO means business, and a large part of what that means is helping customers solve their most challenging business integration problems, which can be summarized in CEP-speak as detecting opportunities and threats, in near real-time, as a core corporate competency. 

If you spend a few moments on the Insightful web site, you will find a treasure of documentation that discusses a gold mine of advanced statistical analytics that can be used in a number of mission critical applications.

This is the class of analytics that form the backbone of complex event processing.  In fact, as I have often pointed out (to the dismay of some of my CEP colleagues), any software company that discusses CEP and does not support or advocate advanced analytics are selling snake oil.      TIBCO obviously understands the difference between snake oil, smoke-and-mirrors marketing, and the technology it takes to solve real operational problems.

My hats off and warm congratulations to the team in Palo Alto for demonstrating, yet again, why TIBCO is committed to solving real customer problems with realistic solutions.

Maybe TIBCO will evolve to mean “The Insightful Business Company”   versus the tired and stale “The Information Bus Company” of yesteryears?

Disclaimer:  I have not been an employee of TIBCO for over a year. 

Is CEP a Service or a Process? Reloaded

In Is CEP a Service or a Process? Paul Vincent of TIBCO blogs that any classification of CEP depends on the application, concluding that CEP is both a process and a service. 

Well (sorry Paul!), I disagree.  CEP is neither a process nor a service; CEP is a concept architecture for processing complex events.   (I have advocated a CEP functional reference architecture, as most readers know.)

To illustrated this point, let’s take a quick look at another functional reference architecture (or, if you perfer, a conceptual architecture), distributed computing.

Is distributed computing a service or a process?

Of course, it is neither a process nor a service, distributed computing is a generic architectural pattern (or style) for processing distributed data, generally across a network.

The same question can be asked of SOA. 

Is SOA a process or a service?

Again, the answer is almost identical. 

SOA is an architectural style (subclass) of distributed computing.

Now, is CEP a product or a service?

CEP is an architectural style (or pattern) for processing complex events.

CEP is neither a process nor a service. 

On the other hand, there are component of a CEP solution that can be represented as a stand alone process or a service.   The same can be said of EAI, SOA, and other subclasses of distributed computing architectural styles and patterns.

Open Service Event Management

One of the benefits of working in different countries is to get the perspectives of various client’s event processing problems.    Of interest to event processing professionals, companies are moving away from expensive software solutions and increasingly moving toward experimenting with economical and open software packages to solve complex problems.   

Recently, I was talking with a client about their experience with commercial security event management (SEM) solutions, for example ArcSight.   In his opinion, ArcSight was not an economically viable solution for his company, so he recommended I take a look at Open Service Event Management (OSEM). 
 
OSEM helps organizations collect, filter, and send problem reports for supported systems (ProLiant and Integrity) running compatible agents.   OSEM automatically sends service event notifications when system problems are detected.

I have not had a chance to look under the hood of OSEM and see how it can be used to collect and send events to emerging rule-based event processing engines.    However, this looks like an interesting lab project and I would like to hear from readers who have experimented with this systems architecture.

Scheduling Agents with Rules Engines

Paul Vincent of TIBCO talks about agents in his post, CEP and Agents…

At the core, TIBCO’s BusinessEvents is RETE-based rules engine and rules engines are well suited for scheduling problems.  This makes perfect sense, since many of TIBCO’s customers deploy BusinessEvents in scheduling-oriented, not detection-oriented, solutions.

It begs to be pointed out, however, that scheduling is only one component of a CEP architecture. 

Normally, the scheduling component of a distributed event processing architecture manages the intelligent scheduling of the sharing of data between distributed agents that are running a variety of analytics.

Simply stated, all agents are not rules engines; however, rules engines are often used to schedule the cooperation between analytical agents in a distributed agent-based architecture.

A Page from Greg’s Diary: Nerwana Software

I started my career in IT many years ago and since that year have worked in enterprise IT for year and years.     Almost all of my odd career story evolves around working with end users, often advising, architecting and managing the complexity of large systems integration projects, from hands on implementation to strategic vision development.  My deep background is with Techrotech in network systems engineering.

A few years ago, years after I started my career at Techrotech, I grew a bit dismayed at enterprise software companies.   They would, for the most part, always come to us, the end users, and try to sell us large software packages.  Their sales and technical teams had very little domain knowledge of the problems they claimed they could solve – and they had little doubt that if we purchased their wares, our problems would be solved,

These software companies were keen on buzzwords and technology jargon but somewhat clueless on operational solutions or the challenges of implementation across a large federated organization with many powerful business units and “in name only” CIOs.  We often referred to these software sales guys, and their favorite systems integrators, as “drive by (or fly by) implementations” where they dump the software (and hardware) at your door and run like crazy!

So, I joined a very cool Silicon Valley company,  Nerwana Software, hoping to change all of that, or so I thought 🙂

Naturally, when I first came on board Nerwana , the entire organization, from executives to recent new hires out of school, heaped praise-upon-praise on my years of operational experience at Techrotech and elsewhere.   They cheered me on as I wrote papers and created slides on operational use cases and event processing solutions that the sales and solutions teams could take to market.   They sang my praises as I spoke to large audiences and evangelized their most innovative software and solutions.  They were pleased with the great reviews from customers.

As one would expect, I was destined to learn the face of the problems I experienced as an end-user “outsider,” now from an “insider’s” perspective. 

One of the interesting challenges that surfaced at Nerwana was the “let’s export our culture and business model to the world” mantra, maybe better referred to as “if it sells in New York, then we must sell it the same way in Tokyo or Bejing!”

Also, I really was surprised to find out how dependent Nerwana was on the opinion of analysts.   When I worked for the customers and end users, we rarely paid any special attention to the analyst’s opinions.   Sure, analysts provides a good data point, but that is all it was (or is), simply another data point.   

I soon found that software companies are often held hostage by “analyst chasing” which really was an eye opener for me, because we end-users, the people who actually buy the software, view analysts as mere mortals reading from the same foggy crystal ball as everyone else. 

Another one of the fasinating challenges I experienced at Nerwana was what some would call  “The Hero Culture.”  

I’ll elaborate on some these, hopefully interesting, observations and experiences in a future Page from Greg’s Diary.