• Blog
  • About
  • Archives

elemental links

brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

InformationWeek Global CIO: Real-time is real-good for Tibco

October 4, 2010 By brenda michelson

Speaking of real-time business, in the Global CIO column, Bob Evans of InformationWeek reports on the “massive promise of real-time business, real-time visibility, and real-time decision-making” as a significant contributor to Tibco’s recent earnings success and go-forward confidence.

From his conversation with Vivek Ranadive, Tibco’s founder and CEO, Evans cites Ranadive’s confidence in the face of “20th century competitors”:

"These are all 20th-century companies [Oracle, SAP, IBM and Microsoft] grasping at the question of ‘How do we become 21st-century companies?’ " he said. ‘How do we change and enhance our core competencies? How do we marry the three great trends of today: event-driven models, cloud computing, and mobility—how do we marry those without destroying our legacy?’ "

On top of that, he said, those big companies with vast rosters of legacy products and entrenched business units find it hard to embrace questions such as "What does the customer of the 21st century look like, or what does the Facebook phenomenon mean to my company, my products, and my customers?"

A large contributor to Tibco’s results was services.  According to the article, the reason is two-fold.  One, customers are aggressively embracing the shift from “transaction-orientation” to event-driven, and two, there is a shortage of relevant third-party skills.  [That’s just fine with me!]

“In a typical engagement we might have a customer with a couple of hundred people on a project and Tibco provides 10% of 15% of them.

"But that is changing—rapidly—and as a result our offshore services business has tripled as we have come across massive—truly massive—opportunities," he said.

"On Sunday, I met with one customer who wants an escalation in Tibco people from the 40 now working on the project to more than 200. This is happening because we want to move them from their old 20th-century infrastructure to event-driven platforms and in order to achieve that with such new technology, we have to do everything.

While projects with hundreds of vendor-supplied consultants tend to make me nervous, it is an interesting data point on customer appetite for change and investment. 

More interesting though was Ranadive’s follow-on statement:

"The tipping point has been reached, and an avalanche of people wanting to do this has started."

And yes, that quote is rhetoric-laden.  However, in his closing, Bob Evans offers some very positive (and colorful) insights of his own:

“I think Ranadive and Tibco would do very well to grow as rapidly as they can in the next 6 months or so because in spite of his zealot’s protestations to the contrary, IBM and Oracle and SAP are going to come after the real-time market like hungry lions on a herd of young antelopes.”

Let the real-time safari begin!

Filed Under: active information, event driven architecture, event processing Tagged With: Tibco

BBC Business News: Real-time (Event Processing) beyond Wall Street

October 1, 2010 By brenda michelson

Thanks to twitter friend @darachennis, I can share a BBC News article on the use of event processing for real-time business beyond Wall Street.  For context, the article describes the use of complex event processing in trading scenarios, citing implementations of Apama and Streambase at a variety of institutions.

As the article continues, other real-time business scenarios are called out, such as port management (logistics), retail (inventory), telecom (network management), healthcare and defense (think spooks).

“Now, real-time processing software has spread beyond Wall Street and the City to other industries.

Apama is used by customers in the Netherlands – Rotterdam has the largest port in Europe, with an annual through-put of about 400 million tons – to manage the logistics of ships, which often fail to arrive on time and spend hours waiting to dock and unload at ports, wasting fuel, money and time.

Rather than wait until the end of the day or week, supermarkets and other large multinational retailers use the software to monitor their stock inventories in real-time.

Telecoms companies are using it to manage the strain on their networks. Mobile phone firm Three, in Italy, is using Apama to test whether it can offer customers faster music downloads – for a price – when network usage is low.

SAP’s software is also being deployed on offshore oil rigs and even in hospitals around the world. This allows diabetic patients, for example, to have their blood sugar levels monitored and insulin administered if it gets dangerously low.

StreamBase has discussed using its software to monitor patients in hospital, looking for abnormalities and alerting doctors immediately, before the situation becomes critical.

Mr Sikka says a large British gas company recently started using its software to analyse the data from smart meters of 60,000 customers in London, and discovered that there was a spike in energy usage around 7pm.

The firm changed its tariffs to account for that.

Future applications that are being discussed include the military, such as real-time monitoring of troop and tank movements. StreamBase is already used by the US National Security Agency to monitor security threats.”

I couldn’t agree more with the article’s closing quote, offered by Streambase CEO Mark Palmer, “It’s difficult to think of an industry that isn’t affected by real-time".

Filed Under: active information, event driven architecture, event processing

Capital Markets Event Processing Symposium in NY – $99.00

September 20, 2010 By brenda michelson

Due to generous sponsor support – Starview Technology, Progress/Apama, Sybase and IBM – the Capital Markets Event Processing Symposium is now only $99.  That’s a full day program (October 6, 2010) featuring Roy Schulte, Opher Etzion, Colin Clark, Dr. John Bates and more. Check it out.

[Disclosure: The Event Processing Community of Practice is a client of Elemental Links].

Filed Under: circuit, event driven architecture, event processing

New Speakers Added! Event Processing Symposium: Capital Markets Edition – October 6, 2010 in NY, NY

September 7, 2010 By brenda michelson

The Capital Markets Edition of the Event Processing Symposium keeps getting stronger.  In addition to our opener and closer, Roy Schulte and Opher Etzion, respectively, the program is now completely loaded with Event Processing talent.

To name a few recent additions:

Identifying and Correlating Patterns In Real Time Market Data with Terabytes of Historical Data, by Colin Clark, CTO, Cloud Event Processing

Using Complex Event Process & Map/Reduce, we will describe and demonstrate a system capable of identifying and correlating patterns in real time market data to historical market data. The approach will demonstrate the use of complex event processing, symbolic aggregate approximation, an mpp database, and both sql and streaming map/reduce. Using this approach and a combination of statistical and probabilistic processes, one can distill current market activity into a recognizable pattern that is then able to be used to search terabytes of underlying market data for similar conditions.

Optimizing the Trade Process with the Starview Smart Enterprise Platform, by Thomas Sulzbacher, CEO of Starview Technology

Optimization of the trading process and minimizing risk requires continuous real-time visibility and control from Front Office to Back Office. We will discuss how to synthesize these trade events from critical systems using decision analytics to ensure the appropriate content is delivered to the right place at the right time from trade execution to settlement.

Dr. John Bates, of Progress/Apama, on hot-topic capital market trends and conversations, such as HFT, the flash-crash and looming regulatory change.

In addition to the talks, there will be ample opportunity to connect with the speakers and fellow attendees during networking breaks and via a panel discussion.

Check out the program.  See you in New York!

[Disclosure: The Event Processing Community of Practice (EP CoP) is a client of Elemental Links].

Filed Under: circuit, event driven architecture, event processing

Join me: Event Processing Symposium: Capital Markets Edition – October 6, 2010 in NY, NY

July 29, 2010 By brenda michelson

Seems as though I’m channeling a conference promoter lately, but I’ve got one more to share.  A Capital Markets focused Event Processing Symposium in New York, on October 6, 2010, organized by the Event Processing Community of Practice.

In the opening keynote, Roy Schulte of Gartner will provide an overview of the commercial use of CEP (complex event processing), focusing on capital markets.  Roy’s session will cover these key issues:

  1. Buy versus build – When to use commercial CEP software and when to write your own
  2. Market landscape – Who are the major CEP vendors and what role does each play in capital markets
  3. Product selection – What to look for in an event processing platform

Opher Etzion, Event Processing Scientific Leader at IBM Research Lab in Haifa and chair of the Event Processing Technical Society, is our closer.  Opher will share insights from his research and his soon-to-be released Event Processing in Action book.

For more information, please visit the Symposium site.

 

[Disclosure: The Event Processing Community of Practice (CoP) is a client of my firm, Elemental Links. I am a member of the Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS).]

Filed Under: business ecology, event driven architecture, event processing

« Previous Page
Next Page »

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

Technology Architect.

Trusted Advisor.

(BIO)

  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Recent Posts

  • Experts Sketch
  • PEW Research: Tech Saturation, Well-Being and (my) Remedies
  • technology knowledge premise
  • The Curse of Knowledge
  • better problems and technology knowledge transfer

Recent Tweets

  • Harshest editorial feedback I ever received “stultified and like death”… (wildly popular paper, as it turned out):… https://t.co/qWNwBCOS5i February 28, 2023 2:16 pm
  • “…where the process of drawing itself can take us. We can follow a suggestion, a squiggle, shadow, or smudge, and s… https://t.co/oRg0x2LoXG November 30, 2022 5:05 pm
  • On the waiting list for Post, join me (on the waitlist) via https://t.co/U8wYK707f6 November 24, 2022 4:17 pm
© 2004-2022 Elemental Links, Inc.