Louis Lovas
09-22-2008 08:53 PM
Reflections on the Gartner Conference and EPTS4
Likemany of my colleagues in the event processing community, I thought Iwould share a few reflections on the recent happens at thetwo back-to-back technology conferences of the past week. Gartner sponsored theirannual vendor-fest known as the Event Processing Summit, and the EPTS had their fourth annual symposium. This being my first EPTS, I've had some initial thoughts and reactions which I've shared over the weekend. For this, I'll delve more into the conference's content.

I attended a number of the sessions at the Gartner conference. I did nothave any set agenda so I picked the sessions more on a personal appealrather than some well thought out plan. While I do work in an engineeringteam, I have a customer focus so I attended all the customer sessions. I always find it valuable to understand how customers aredeploying event processing technology in real-world use cases. Theirefforts clearly infiltrate the product roadmap of vendors.

• Lou Morgan of HG Trading, a lively speaker described his use ofevent processing technology in high frequency trading. Lou has been anApama user for quite a few years and we've invited him to speak on ourbehalf on a number of occasions. He's an entertaining soul with a clearunderstanding of the Capital Markets business. We're delighted he presented his use of Apama at this conference.

• Albert Doolittle of George Weiss Associates Inc. gave a talkon using event processing technologies in this firm. Albertdescribed his technique to pick a vendor for his CEPproject, which if I were to paraphrase was a coin flip. Towardsthe end of his talk, he digressed from CEP technologies to present ashort discourse on high performance computing (HPC). The idea of leveraging supercomputing-like technologies and FPGA's for compute intensive operations like Black-SholesOptions pricing certainly has caught Mr. Doolittle's attention.Typically CEP and compute intensive tasks don't mix well because oflatency considerations. However, a marriage of CEP and HPC is possiblyone made in heaven. I was intrigued.

• The ebullient Marc Alder gave his brusque, no-holds-barred perspective on the CEP project he embarked on at Citi. Marc did agreat job of explaining the challenges of introducing a new technologyat a large corporation, one with a well entrenched bureaucratic ITorganization. I think most of us have faced thebureaucratic fortress at some time or another in our careers. Knowing how toplaythe game is a skill only a few master well, kudos to Marc for hissuccessful venture. As Marc unfolded his project'sarchitecture he wisely chose a course to prevent vendor lock-in.

The juxtaposition of these three use-cases was most curious. LouMorgan jumped deep into CEP technology and bet-the-ranch on it.Albert Doolittle took a gamble with a coin flip in choosing a vendorand Marc Alder kept his choice of a CEP product isolated and containedwithin his overall system architecture. A safeguard in case he felt theneed to replace it. Nonethelessall great examples of how CEP is gaining momentum in main streambusiness.

One session I thoroughly enjoyed was Don DeLoach's "Extending the range of CEP".Don is the CEO of Aleri. I'm not sure I enjoyed this sessionmore for its content or for Don's presentation skills. As isusually the case at technology conferences, it's death-by-Powerpoint.Slideware is typically jammed with an overabundance of barely readabletext and dazzling graphics. Don's slides however had a clearminimalist slant. A plain monotone background with either a single wordor a (very) short phase well choreographed with his oration. He spoke of CEP as an evolving technology from the simple abilityto filter streaming data to managing complex application state. He usedan example that has become the Pièce de résistance of Aleri, order book consolidation.

There were many sessions on SOA and Event Driven Architectures - so many I lost count.

I attended the panel discussion on low-latency messaging protocols. Thiswas a Q&A session moderated by Roy Schulte of Gartner. The panelistswere the crop of high-speed/low-latency message vendors. TIBCO-killers as I've affectionately referred to them. Vendors such as29West, RTI, Solace Systems, IBM and even TIBCO themselves (apologies to thosevendors I've not mentioned). Each described how they have defiedphysics to achieve incredible speeds yet still provide reliabledelivery, management tools and even application level services (i.e.RTI's last value cache). However, its noteworthy to contrastthese low-latency vendors, all focused on shaving microseconds off message deliveryvia proprietary, even hardware-based schemes, to the many standard-based messaging systems trumpeted in othersessions. Those SOA and EDA sessions paraded a whole barrage of Web Services based standards models(i.e. WSDL, WS-Eventing, WS-Notification, WSDM, the list goes on and on) as the right way to build applications. These certainly seem like opposing forces that will only fosterconfusion in the eyes of those who have a clear business need for low-latencyyet desire to adhere to a standards approach.


The EPTS Symposium began its first day with a keynote addressfrom a VC which had funded Event Zero. I had first metwith Event Zero about a year ago, they haveappeared to recast themselves from an adapter/connectivity vendor toone delivering an Event Processing Network (EPN). An EPN can be definedas an infrastructure platform for event processing agents orservices. Those CEP agents performing both independently and in concert with other agents(or services) act upon streaming data sources. Together the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Such isthe grandiose vision of an EPN. SRI wasalso promoting asimilar notion of event processing as a service, which I would argue isa variation on this same theme. Unfortunately, I think there istrouble ahead. The problem is simply timing, maturity and standards (orlack thereof). I don’t think customers will buy into EPN'sor Event Zero's vision untilthere is a clear establishment of standards for CEP. As a perspective, Application Servervendorstried this and failed (anyone remember SilverStream? Apptivity?). Itwas notuntil the J2EE specification established a uniform model thatcreatedtrue viability for a network or service infrastructureplatform for AppServers. Until we see the formation of CEPstandards for interoperability and integration, the appeal of CEP willremain as basically a standaloneapplication platform and vendors will continue to market a solutionsapproach, just look at any CEP vendor's website for proof of this.Nonetheless, Event Zero has embarked on a bold initiative and I wishthem all the best.

Speaking of standards, moving slightly up the stack one could clearlydetect the prevailing wind blowing against streaming SQL as thelanguage of choice for CEP. Going back to the Gartner conferencethere were a few noticeable comments to that effect. Marc Adler,described streaming SQL as making the simple things difficult todo. Don DeLoach, downplayed the SQL language in Aleri in favor ofthe SPLASHenhancements. The renowned Dr. Luckham in his closing keynote address outlined Holistic Event Processing as the futureimplied it required a language beyond streaming SQL.

At the EPTS Alex Koslenkov from Betfair castigated the streaming SQL approach for his use case in managing complex long-running state. Alex is an advocate of the RuleML approach to CEP languages, as such it stands to reason he doesn't have a high regard for streaming SQL and it showed.

Susan Urban from Texas Tech University presented a research project ona language they've dubbed StreamCEDL. Susan denounced streaming SQL aslacking the algebraic expressiveness necessary to move beyond simplestream processing to true complex event processing. One example, shementioned in the description of StreamCEDL is its support of anAPERIODIC operator. The intent is to process irregular orout-of-order data streams.

Lastly, Chris Ferris from IBM presented on Industry Software Standards.This was a great session that portrayed the far reaching impact ofadopting standards across our industry. He stressed the importance in making everyattempt to get broad vendor agreement, customer validation and to be sure the adoptedtechnology serves the needs of the community because you'll have tolive with it for years to come. This is such an important messagein the quest for standardization of CEP. Open, widely acceptedstandards are exactly what the CEP community needs; the sooner weembark on this journey the better.




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