Archives for September 2008

The final podcast from the SOA Consortium’s SOA and event processing day is a hot topics roundtable discussion featuring Ian Foster of Cisco, Bruce Henderson of Savant, Ed Lynch of IBM, and Greg Peres of Sun Microsystems.  As moderator, I asked each to start by sharing their thoughts on SOA & event processing business drivers, technology challenges, human/organizational elements and event processing’s market timing – new or retro-technology strategy.

In their remarks, each roundtable leader called out at least one business scenario for SOA and event processing, these included manufacturing floor management, real-time customer loyalty programs, healthcare and electronic records management and business visibility. In respect to technology challenges, the conversation centered on dealing with massive amounts of information, and the requisite implications on volume, scale, filtering and security. An interesting point on the human aspect is that today’s teenagers, with their ubiquitous use of texting, are already very event aware, quick to respond to problems or opportunities delivered via an event-based mechanism.

After the opening insights, the roundtable leaders engaged in discussion with each other, and meeting attendees on a variety of topics including event-based information proliferation and privacy, event and event emitter standards, recognizing event patterns and business trends, and business confidence in automated, event-driven reactions.

As the session closed, I asked each roundtable leader to provide a design tip to architects and developers whose services need to either emit or respond to events.  Essentially, the tie between services, instrumentation and events. Their responses follow:

Ian Foster: “I think it starts with the business user, a conversation with the business user about the key events that they would want information on. You know, is it a key event, the location of that part on the manufacturing floor? Is a key event the temperature of that truck coming across the country? What are the key events? And then look at how you measure to instrument.”

Greg Peres: “Make sure that as an architect, you are choosing technologies and platforms that are open, so that the event that you generate and design are open to other technologies and integrate, so that you can process them in a variety of different ways.”

Ed Lynch: “In my experience, the technical aspect is to make the event emission extremely lightweight…Do not make it intrusive, because at the end of the day you do not want to have somebody make a performance trade-off between the emitting of the event and the driving of the transaction. On the consuming side, make sure that the event correlation engine can drive services with a standard interface. Once you do that, I think the standards on the driving side and the standards on the event emissions side – as long as they are lightweight – it becomes a ‘synthesize the infrastructure mechanism’, as opposed to an ‘integrated into the infrastructure’ mechanism.”

Bruce Henderson: “Do not be afraid to create event models. I know it is sort of the bastard child of UML to draw these little blob boxes and put event transitions between them, but I have found in the past that that is a very powerful means to be able to identify and really get a handle on what your events could and should be. And working with the business user is a tremendous leverage in that.

And I would also say that do not treat your event pipes and your event information as stovepipes. Decorate them with meta data, because at some point down the road as it was mentioned before, when you put these things out, you do not really actually know necessarily who is going to consume them or why. So make them as interesting as possible without overloading them so that they can find lots of neat homes and friends to play with.”

To listen to the roundtable podcast or download the roundtable transcript please go here.

 

[Disclosure: Cisco, IBM, Savant & Sun are not clients of Elemental Links, however they are sponsors of the SOA Consortium, which is an Elemental Links client].

As I mentioned yesterday, the SOA & Event Processing day at the June SOA-C meeting raised a variety of viewpoints on the combined use of SOA & event processing to deliver business capability.  The podcast released today is from Savant’s Bruce Henderson.  I really enjoyed this talk, and admittedly, laughed out loud at his reference to data warehouses as the ‘big schema of doom’. 

The details from my SOA Consortium Insights post:

"Adding a unique perspective to the SOA Consortium’s SOA & Event processing day, Bruce Henderson, Chief Scientist of Savant, spoke of the connection between services, event processing and mashups.  Bruce shared his thesis that many major business, geo-political and societal problems arise because we don’t know enough to avoid them.  Despite swimming in data from a vast number of sources, the inability to relate and interact with that information has organizations operating out of rear view mirrors.  As Bruce succinctly stated, “What we don’t know can hurt us”. 

Supporting his thesis, Bruce spoke of three major events, the dotcom bubble, the September 11 attacks and the U.S. housing market implosion, whose impact could have been reduced had the available, yet scattered, data been correlated and viewed in totality.   Bruce then shared his prediction, based on applying Savant’s information agility techniques to publicly available FDIC reports, that the US Banking System faces impending failures similar to Northern Rock in the UK.

From that vivid context, Bruce walked through the technical concepts to relate and correlate disparate information via microscale services, events, event classification and metadata decoration, and rich user interfaces. 

Completing the circle, Bruce demonstrated three of Savant’s mashup projects, including the US Banking System mashup that incorporates a trend visual to show mortgage portfolios, related write-offs and balance sheet strength of major US banks.

To listen to an audio recording of Bruce’s presentation and view the slides go here."

[Disclosure: Savant is not a client of Elemental Links, however Savant is a sponsor of the SOA Consortium, which is an Elemental Links’ client.]

Speaking of Event Processing, day two of the SOA Consortium’s June meeting focused on combining SOA and Event Processing to deliver business capability.  Ok, no big surprise that I got the SOA/Event Processing topic on the agenda.  What might be surprising though, are the different perspectives and business scenarios brought forward by the invited speakers and panelists.  This week, the SOA-C is releasing three podcasts from the SOA & EP morning.  The first is IBM’s Ed Lynch who spoke of connecting SOA & event processing via BPM. 

The details from my SOA Consortium Insights post:

"Ed Lynch, Product Manager for the BPM & Connectivity portfolio, and Integration Exec for the Aptsoft acquisition, IBM Corporation, kicked off the morning by sharing his view that SOA and Event Processing come together within Business Process Management.

In building his case, Ed first called out the findings of IBM’s Enterprise of the Future CEO study, which speaks to a business environment of accelerating change, brought on by globalization, constant connectivity, doubling data and burgeoning competition. To cope with this torrent of change, executives require two things. First, they need visibility into their businesses, in real-time. Second, those businesses need to be agile. Businesses must be able to respond quickly to opportunities and threats, or risk losing market share to existing or new competitors.

With that business backdrop, Ed shared the basic constructs of event processing and then made the connection to services and business processes. In short, Ed told attendees to think of events as the “when” for the “what” of services. Business processes orchestrate the what, the services, to respond to an event, or a series of events.

Bridging the conceptual and reality, Ed described several customer examples, including fleet management, customer loyalty programs, algorithmic trading, business activity monitoring and fraud detection.

Throughout the presentation, Ed engaged in Q&A with attendees on a range of topics including management practices, data swarms, rule management and event processing futures.

To listen to an audio recording of Ed’s presentation and view the slides please go here."

 

[Disclosure: IBM is not a client of Elemental Links, however IBM is a founding sponsor of the SOA Consortium, which is an Elemental Links’ client.]