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brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

Archives for September 2008

CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium Case Study Contest: And the winners are…

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This morning at the SOA Consortium meeting in Orlando, Richard Soley announced the winners of the CIO Magazine | SOA Consortium case study contest.  The goal was to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing SOA adoption. To qualify for the contest, the SOA project must have been completed with demonstrated business results.

There was one overall winner, and five industry recognition winners.  To see the winners and learn more about their stories jump to SOA Consortium Insights or the SOA Consortium website. 

 

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my company, Elemental Links]

Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) Symposium take-aways

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Before I fully immerse myself in the SOA Consortium this week, I wanted to augment my “reporting” on last week’s EPTS symposium with a little analysis.

My EPTS Take-Aways

True Industry Collaboration – As Opher mentioned, 41 of the 70 attendees were event processing vendors, representing a many of the technology providers in the space: Aleri, Coral8, Event Zero, IBM, iLog, Nastel, Oracle, Progress Apama, RuleML, Streambase, Tibco, and West Global.  What impressed me is these vendors attended the symposium not to one up each other, but to work together to move both the technology and market forward.  While I didn’t attend the follow-on business meeting, I learned that several new working groups have been proposed to explore important topics including event processing languages, reference architectures, benchmarks, university curriculums and interoperability.  These are in addition to the current EP glossary and use case efforts.

Cross Industry Applicability – While Capital Markets and “secret agencies” are fertile grounds for event processing applications, the market doesn’t begin and end there.  Many participants, myself included, brought forward event processing examples related to business intelligence, business visibility & responsiveness, passenger transportation, freight & logistics, information dissemination, healthcare (epidemic, patient monitoring, RFID in-body monitoring), ambient intelligence (smart homes, smart cities, personalized mobile information systems), workplace safety, homeland security (storm evacuation, first responder systems, terrorism situational awareness, power / fuel / water system monitoring, and environmental systems.

Hype is Relatively Low – I made this point in my panel presentation, and frankly, I think it surprised many of the attendees who are immersed in event processing, and therefore partake in high, but localized hype.  So, for my practitioner readers, I apologize in advance for sparking a hype wave.  However, if the EPTS sticks to its mission, and truly collaborates on (as Seth Grimes mentioned) bringing some ‘precision’ to the space, then the hype could very well be productive, rather than destructive. 

Forthcoming Battles – Speaking of destructive, two battles are imminent.  One, the language wars: (a) SQL vs. procedural vs. Rules and (b) mine vs. yours.  Second, what are the boundaries of event processing?  Is information dissemination in or out?  Same with sensor applications?  Does it depend on the use of an event processing engine?  As Mani Chandy asked, is event processing the engine, or the result?

Early for Standards – While standards are good for practitioners and market adoption, standards for standards sake are a mistake.  And yes, I am thinking of the ‘early and often’ delivery of WS* standards as I type this.  So, in a way, I was relieved to hear that EPTS isn’t knocking down the doors of standards bodies with ‘must haves’.  However, I hope the group doesn’t back burner the standards conversation, because if they don’t take the lead, someone else might, and that could be troublesome for all parties.

 

[Disclosure: None of the vendors mentioned in this post are current clients of Elemental Links, but that can change 😉 ]

EPTS Event Processing Symposium, Live Blogging Day 2: Event Processing Standards Panel

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Panel: Event Processing Standards? – What? When? Why? How they are related to other standards?

Moderator: Roy Schulte, Gartner

Panelists:

  • Adrian Paschke (RuleML)
  • Bob Marcus (SRI)
  • Chris Ferris (IBM)
  • Louis Lovas (Progress/Apama)
  • Paul Vincent (TIBCO)

Roy opens sharing Gartner taxonomy of relationships between Web Architecture, SOA and Event Processing.  SOA & Web overlap in Web Oriented Architecture, SOA & Event Processing overlap in Event Driven SOA.  (No overlap charted between Web & Event, but there probably is one.)

Next, Roy talks about how SOA adoption accelerated with WS* standards.  As well, he points out important Web Standards such as HTTP, REST & Atom (maybe more, slide moved to fast).

Points out the neither WS* or Web standards address application portability of CEP.  Nor, were they expect to.

Questions for panel:

  • Are protocol standards for messaging important?  If so, Atom, SOAP, WS-RM, WS-Eventing, WS-Notification, AMQP, DDS, other?
  • Do we need standards for event schemas?
  • (slide moved to quick)
  • (slide moved to quick)

Paul Vincent, Tibco

What areas of interest?

  • Model language standard
  • Execution Semantics standard
  • Middleware channel standard
  • event payloads / DSLs
  • Framework / Service standard

Tibco, what, when and why depend on customer interest/demand.  Shows laundry list of current standards and activities that may apply.

Adrian Pashcke, RuleML

Shares another list of existing standards that may apply.  Some standards overlap with Paul’s list.  Lots of functional overlap on and between the lists. Adrian is second of five panelists, I have a bad feeling about where this is going.

Bob Marcus, SRI

6 Points for Event Processing

  • Explosion in EP applications caused by data deluge
  • Cloud platform will be a major part of the solution for many users
  • An enterprise cloud computing group has been formed which could provide a forum for Event Processing as a Service
    • Specify data sources to monitor
    • Specify QoS, resources to use
    • Need a standard complex event definition language for user queries

 

Louis Lovas, Technical Fellow, Progress / Apama

Starts with the integration challenge, including many message protocols and many message semantics (data formats, business transaction/semantics), capital markets are fragmented — racing to microsecond, leads to proprietary protocols, SOA standards abound and sensor devices have little standardization on data formats.

Standards lead to reduced implementation costs, improved vendor software tooling and specialized components for industries.  Warns against blindly applying SOA standards to event processing.  End up with bunch of JMS messages, not events.

“Language is most contentious issue facing EP industry.  Streaming SQL does not equal CEP.”

Louis throws another standard into the mix, STAC Benchmark council.

 

Chris Ferris, IBM

Chris asks, “are we ready to create standard?”  Will standards created now allow products to be put in place for next 5-15 years?  Is there a framework that can be developed now and extended over time?

Semantics will be the key.  Dealing with information from organizations in which you (event processor) have no control.  How to connect the dots between the various semantic schemes?

 

Q&A

1. What should EPTS do in respect to pushing requirements to standards organization?  Is it time?  Or, still too early?  Should group be working on event format?  Panel discussing origins of SOAP & WSDL and how ‘ecosystem was created’.  Now, I’m scared.  Oh good, so is another panelist, calling out shift to REST because of WS* complexity.

Unfortunately, I need to cut out to catch my train.  I’ll ping Roy to learn about the panel outcome.

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

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