vincent
09-18-2008 09:46 AM
So here in sunny Stamford CT we are at the
Gartner Event Processing Summit (but not “processing Gartner events”, or even “summiting the Gartner Event Process”). The conference [*1] was well-organised, and proved ideal for those wanting a basic education on the concepts and architectures involved. Probably the attendee objectives could be achieved in a less-expensive / more attractive one day event (such as am - analyst overviews, pm - vendor case studies, evening - exhibition). For sure it would have benefited from synergies with something like a BPM (CEP can be viewed as just another form of STP automation of a business process, after all!) or SOA conference. Also a clearer definition of Event Processing (continuous? human? modeling? real-time execution? analytics?) might help. For a 2 day event, maybe it could have gone into more detail on Complex Event Processing technologies (queries, rules, flows, grids, visualizations, dynamic process controls, models, languages, …). Of course, I’m
sure Gartner will make it better for next year!
The* kickoff was a keynote by
Roy Schulte introducing the basics of (a vendor classification scheme for) CEP. Other keynotes were
Mani Chandi on EDA types [*2], and
David Luckham on CEP’s Potential - so the CEP space’s “3 Amigos” were well and truly represented.
In between were analyst and vendor sessions, and the exhibitor hall. TIBCO was well represented on the
Ultra Low Latency Messaging panel by Financial Services CTO Spencer Greene, although there was a slight disappointment that everyone on the panel was so well-behaved [*3]. TIBCO’s Alan Lundberg gave the overview of the value of CEP, and we then went through 3 of the operational CEP applications that have deployed since last year’s Gartner EP Summit (and were previously mentioned at the
TIBCO User Group).
Other EP Summit commentaries can be seen from
IBM R&D’s Opher and
Citi’s Marc Adler.
Notes
[1] Unfortunately, the majority of the audience were vendors or other technology suppliers - not the end-users expected by the sponsors. Gartner were probably as caught out as the rest of us by the
Wall Street fallout this week. Probably, too, the
byline of the event being “designed to help you understand and leverage event-driven architecture (EDA) as an integral part of your enterprise SOA strategy” put a few people off - EP and EDA are related, but separate topics. Nevertheless the EP Summit proved to be a good warm-up for the
EPTS meeting.
[2] Maybe. EDA is very dependent on infrastructure, though, which is unlikely to be ripped n’ replaced. MOM users like TIBCO’s are pretty well placed to exploit EDA though…
[3] Spencer’s advice to end-users looking at middleware was to limit vendor teams to ~2 people for Proof-Of-Concept exercises (on the basis that if you need more, its either not a POC, or not a good solution…).
Source...
09-18-2008
