• Blog
  • About
  • Archives

elemental links

brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

In-brief: Conversation with Jeff Wootton on Event Processing at Sybase, SAP Company

January 27, 2011 By brenda michelson

Ever since SAP announced its acquisition of Sybase last May, I’ve been curious as to the future of Sybase’s event processing assets. At the time of the acquisition, it appeared as though CEP was a footnote to Sybase’s database and mobile offerings:

“Both SAP and Sybase will benefit from synergies across product lines and markets. SAP will accelerate the reach of its solutions across mobile platforms and drive forward the realization of its in-memory computing vision. This will drive higher user adoption of SAP software and unlock significant business value out of existing customer investments. In addition, Sybase’s innovative mobile platform can connect all applications and data (SAP and non-SAP) and enable them on mobile devices. SAP, Sybase and their customers will be able to tap into Sybase’s messaging network to reach 4 billion mobile subscribers through 850+ operator relationships worldwide and engage their consumers via alerts, transactions and promotions on their mobile devices.

For Sybase, SAP in-memory technology will provide the opportunity for dramatic performance improvements to its analytic processing capabilities. Sybase will also be able to bring its complex event processing and analytics expertise, which was built in the financial sector, to customers in other industries, markets and product areas in which SAP has a complementary, strong presence. Finally, Sybase’s core database business will be enhanced by SAP in-memory technology to deliver integrated transactional and analytical capabilities. At the same time, SAP reinforced its dedication to customer choice by stating that it will continue its commitment to supporting leading database vendors.

The synergies between the two companies will also expand opportunities for the SAP and Sybase ecosystems. Software and implementation partners can capture new opportunities by innovating on Sybase’s market-leading mobile platform, which will make it easier to create, deliver and securely manage mobile enterprise applications across major device types.”

Recently, as a result of an inquiry from a SAP-curious client of mine, I’ve had the opportunity to get involved with SAP’s blogger program. [Non-compensated outreach program]. In discussing my interests with SAP, I emphasized event processing and inquired about the fate of not only Sybase’s RAP, but also the assets of “CorAleri“.

Sidenote [corrected*]: In March of 2009, two of the original independent CEP companies products, Aleri and Coral8, merged came together under the Aleri brand, as the result of an asset sale. Less than a year later, in February 2010, Sybase purchased the assets of Aleri, retaining hiring key players and supporting the product development direction to combine the best of Aleri and Coral8 products. A few months later, SAP purchased Sybase, leaving many of us to wonder what would happen with Aleri and Coral8.

Last week, I had the opportunity to connect with Jeff Wootton of Sybase, formerly Aleri, who is responsible for Sybase CEP and RAP. In addition to chatting about the ever widening applicability of event processing, Jeff answered my questions on product direction and market positioning.

Jeff began by sharing that CEP (event processing) is viewed as a strategic growth technology within Sybase. Currently, CEP is offered on its own (Sybase Aleri Streaming Platform) and as part of Sybase RAP.

While heavily utilized in financial services, Jeff spoke of adoption in other industry verticals, including telecommunications and healthcare.

Event processing isn’t limited to the Sybase product line. SAP’s new BusinessObjects Event Insight product embeds the Aleri engine to provide the complex event processing capability:

“SAP BusinessObjects Event Insight is a new EIM solution that enables business users to discover and understand the business impact of events in real-time by delivering:

  • A unique intelligent event grid (patent-pending) that distributes the processing and monitoring of events in real-time from multiple data sources across a distributed network
  • A complex event processing (CEP) engine that processes event streams ( in excess of 500K per record) to identify complex patterns that may represent business opportunities or threats
  • Integration with the semantic layer in SAP BusinessObjects BI platform, which supports queries on top of event streams, correlation of event data with transactional data, alerts to business users, and delivery of information to BI tools, such as SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and SAP Crystal Reports
  • An administrative UI enabling you to set up event agents on multiple data sources (e.g. data warehouses, applications, sensors, message-driven middleware) to monitor structured or unstructured data without programming”

Embedding the Aleri engine within BusinessObjects reminded me of my very first CEP product briefing, in early 2006, with Terry Cunningham, founder of both Crystal Decisions (Crystal Reports) and Coral8. Cunningham’s vision for CEP engines followed the path set by Crystal Reports, a CEP engine embedded in every business application. It has taken awhile, but we are on the way.

Lastly, Jeff spoke to product development. Sybase’s acquisition of Aleri significantly increased engineering resources and investment. As a result, a major release is underway, planned for August. And yes, this release begins delivery on the plan to combine the best of the Aleri and Coral8 product lines. Jeff shared some details, but alas, I’m not at liberty to share at this time.

The bottom line: CEP and event processing is alive and well at Sybase and expanding into SAP. I plan to keep an eye on these developments. You might want to as well.

*Note: After I posted this, Colin Clark shared via Twitter that Aleri-Coral8 and Sybase-Aleri weren’t mergers, but asset sales. Thanks Colin!

Filed Under: active information, event processing Tagged With: CEP

Now Available: Podcasts from Event Processing Symposium – Capital Markets Edition

October 14, 2010 By brenda michelson

Did you miss the Event Processing Symposium at Credit Suisse on October 6?  No problem.  The Event Processing Community of Practice (EP CoP) just released individual speaker podcasts, with slides.  The speaker line-up:

  • Roy Schulte, Gartner
  • Thomas Sulzbacher, Starview Technology
  • David Parker, Sybase (SAP Company)
  • Colin Clark, Cloud Event Processing
  • Dr. John Bates, Progress / Apama
  • Matt Meinel, Informatica
  • Dr. Opher Etzion, IBM Haifa Research Lab

Get the podcasts and slides.

 

[Disclosure: The EP CoP is a client.]

Filed Under: event processing, podcasts

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

Event Processing Luminaries Flock to Madison Avenue

October 3, 2010 By brenda michelson

This Wednesday, October 6, 2010, a contingent of event processing luminaries including  Roy Schulte, Opher Etzion, and Dr. John Bates, are gathering at Credit Suisse West Auditorium to participate in the Capital Markets Event Processing Symposium.

This promises to be a great day, full of pragmatic insights, real-world stories, cutting-edge technology and future thinking.

Thanks to generous sponsors – IBM, Progress/Apama, Starview Technology, Sybase – it’s only $99 for the day.  So really, how can you go wrong?

View the Program.  Register. See you there!

 

[Disclosure: The Symposium is organized by my client, The Event Processing Community of Practice (EP CoP).]

Filed Under: circuit, event processing

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

« 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

  • form doesn't need to constrain... https://t.co/sD58OpW8DR August 5, 2022 8:57 pm
  • "When Wilkes talks to today’s young coders, they are often shocked to learn that women were among the field’s earli… https://t.co/ai9NryNk5D July 19, 2022 12:24 pm
  • Why Strangers Are Good for Us https://t.co/t4hVuJp4Hr June 12, 2022 2:28 pm
© 2004-2022 Elemental Links, Inc.