The Event Processing Blog

StreamBase Announces Gaming Customer: BioWare

Bravo for StreamBase, they have announced they have been selected by BioWare for a multi-user gaming application.  It's not clear from the press release what BioWare actually does with StreamBase, hopefully they will reveal some use case details to help educate the market on complex event processing (CEP) scenarios in the gaming industry.  Although it's not clear what future BioWare application StreamBase will be used for, I hope for CEP's sake it's not the next generation of the BioWare game "Destroy All Humans!"

CEP Use Case: Airlines Operations Monitoring

The recent "JetBlue disaster" in the United States has motivated many airlines to expand their usage of event processing to more effectively monitor and control their flight operations in real-time, and to apply intelligence with complex event processing (CEP) as part of an event driven architecture (EDA).  A public example of this trend is TIBCO's recent  announcement that Air France / KLM, who have chosen TIBCO BusinessEvents, their CEP product, for this kind of application as part of their SOA middleware infrastructure.

Event processing technologies - business activity monitoring (BAM) dashboards, CEP, and event data management can monitor an airline's operational events - from passenger check-in, baggage handling (bag on conveyor, bag off conveyor, bag loaded on ULD, ULD loaded on plane, etc.), and flight operations (flight leaves gate, flight lands, etc.).  Most airlines process "events" manually today, but the increasing desire for intelligent automation is driving the use of EDA to process them.  By applying CEP logic to these events, an airline can better ensure that the right bags get loaded into the right unit loading device (ULD), or ensure that flights leave the gate and take off on time.  CEP rules, or scenarios, can monitor for conditions such as:  "alert baggage handling operations for any bag that was checked in and not loaded onto a ULD within 15 minutes," or, "alert flight operations when a flight has departed the gate but not taken off in 20 minutes," these complex sequences of events can be used to manage airline operations in an intelligent, automated way.

Business activity monitoring (BAM) dashboards provide rich graphical views of baggage, flights, ULDs, even P&L's or important frequent flyers.  BAM dashboards can provide visibility for baggage handling, flight operations, gate agents, even airline executives a real-time and historical view of the business of travel.  They can even show of the resulting real-time P&L for operations.  The dashboard shown is one of many use cases that shows, in real-time, the airport P&L for the past week, flights that are behind schedule in the last 5 days, or last 24 hours, etc., exactly where bags are in the baggage handling process, and more.

Finally, the piece you don't see here in the event processing system is the event data management element, which stores all this event data for subsequent replay, root-cause analysis, and change-of-area views so users can change their scope of concern and look at events from other angles of analysis.

By applying CEP logic, BAM dashboards, and event data management, an airline can increase the intelligence in its operations and proactively detect and avoid disasters when exceptional conditions occur.

TIBCO Airs Out CEP at Air France / KLM

Big CEP use case news yesterday:  TIBCO announced a deal with Air France KLM for service oriented archiecture (SOA) and complex event processing (CEP). 

Way to go TIBCO.  This is exact the kind of continued great press the industry needs, and yet another important use case for the technology.  And, as we're discussion quite a bit on line, TIBCO did a nice job of separating the two concepts:  SOA and CEP, in their communication:

"[Air France] has chosen TIBCO's software as its enterprise backbone to integrate disparate IT assets under one open, scalable service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework. The seamless integration of AIR FRANCE KLM's legacy applications will help streamline business processes and improve efficiency. In addition, TIBCO's complex event processing software will provide real-time analysis and insight into operational performance and customer needs to help increase the airline carrier's market agility and competitive responsiveness."

Yes, Air France appears to be doing both SOA and CEP - TIBCO is not perpetuating the myth that SOA and EDA are the same thing.

Congratulations to TIBCO and the BusinessEvents team.

Another CEP Use Case - Good for Coral8!

Coral8 has published information about an RFID use case in the healthcare industry in their article in RFID Journal about Patient Care Technology Systems and their use of Coral8.   Here's an excerpt about the system and the value complex event processing (CEP) plays in it:

Patient Care Technology Systems (PCTS) provide optimization solutions for improving the operating performance and quality of health-care organizations. The PCTS Amelior solution uses RFID and sensor networks to identify, track and correlate the movement of patients and assets, isolating any processing and utilization problems (see Harmon Hospital Implements RFID to Track Assets).

Originally, the Amelior system was built with a custom-coded event-correlation engine. As customer environments became more sophisticated, PCTS chose to replace the custom-coded infrastructure with off-the-shelf CEP software—specifically, the Coral8 Engine.

Congratulations to the Coral8 folks - John Morrell, the author of this article, and Mark Tsimelzon, the CTO of Coral8.  It's good news to see adoption in the RFID space, and even better to see that they have convinced their customer to be public about their use to help describe the value of CEP technology.

On StreamBase, Algorithmic Trading and MiFID

(NOTE:  This post has been softened in tone from its original form, but carries the same message)

StreamBase recently announced "groundbreaking algorithmic trading and MiFID solutions."   As for this latest release, I'm left wondering what ground has been broken.  That claim, by my read, fails to be substantiated.  I'm curious to know: has StreamBase benchmarked their algorithmic technics and what can they say about them?  What general class of algorithms have they developed?  VWAP?  TWAP?  Market participation?  Spread trading?  MACD?  Iceberg? SOR?  What new techniques have they been developed and on what academic or research foundation?  Were the algorithms co-developed with a specific firm?  Sell-side firms are proud of and promote their proprietary algorithms, so it's odd that the techniques developed were not described.

Just like their press release about a ground swell of support for proprietary SQL-ish CEP standards, these tactics continue to do a disservice to the event processing market.  Despite claims of "broad market acceptance," they have yet to announce news about customers.  Despite claims of "broad support for CEP / SQL standards," no other complex event processing vendor supports their approach in public.  Despite claims of a "ground breaking" algorithmic trading solution, they fail to reveal even a general sense for what kind of ground has been broken.

In this blog we'll continue to promote substance-based marketing tactics by anyone in the event processing industry.  For example, Coral8 published an article on RFID Journal yesterday about Patient Care Technology Systems and Kaskad recently announced their customer, the Boston Stock Exchange.  Coral8 and Kaskad's releases raise awareness of important use cases for CEP technology, and that's good for the whole event processing market.

EDA and Event Processing in Retail and Supply Chain - A Case Study

Applications in the retail and supply chain can gain benefit from event driven architecture (EDA), event processing (EP), and complex event processing (CEP).  Many in the blogosphere have asked for more detail on use cases to better understand these claims.  At Progress Apama, we have been working with our customer BGN as a vehicle to educate on the application of event processing in this industry.

ROI is gained by optimizing processes at multiple levels - large and small.  BGN's use of event-driven business processes has many benefits, and here's one example, described by Jan Vink, the IT Director of BGN, from the whitepaper listed below:

“With this RFID solution in store, you can perform an inventory in less than two hours with two FTEs. In the existing stores you have to close down the whole store and execute the inventory with 20 to 25 employees. This will save us 260,000 euros on a yearly basis.” — Jan Vink, IT Director, BGN

Jan is describing how BGN has changed the way they manage inventory in their operations, and the manual labor that saves.  He goes on in the case study to describe how the increased visibility into their stock provides better customer visibility and satisfaction, as well has helping control their inventory.  Here are the detailed resources to find out more about BGN:

The BGN case study.

A video that describes the BGN system, the software components, and the the business value of this event-driven supply chain and retail operation.

Press release:  Progress Software Customer BGN Wins Prestigious RFID Visionary Award at 2006 RFID Breakthrough Awards

An overview of the Apama architecture that powers the event processing elements of BGN.

Selexyz store web site that describes their automated stores.

Article on CEP in Manufacturing

Good article in Manufacturing Computer Solutions by Brian Tinham, who I met this week in London. 

This was his take on things: Progress Apama, part of application infrastructure and database developer Progress Software, says its high end event correlation software has a significant role to play in bigger ticket manufacturing.

Its systems, which sample any form of data and can show event patterns and correlations at any level, have seen adoption in the financial services sector, but are now ready for use in production.

Kaskad Goes Live at Boston Stock Exchange

Kaskad announced that their CESP product, Korrelera, has gone live at the Boston Stock Exchange (BSE).  This is good news for the event processing industry, an important use case, and, of course, a strong public endorsement for Kaskad, who launched their company in 2005.  The BSE system is a full exchange surveillance system for the BSE, and also monitors RegNMS monitoring system, which of course, is the analogous regulation in the U.S. to MiFID in Europe. 

Compliance in the capital markets is an important use of CEP; we have seen a lot of deployments in as well;  we announced our MiFID relationship with Microsoft last month.  No detail was revealed in the Kaskad press release, but we see CEP commonly applied to best price execution ("BestEX").  BestEx is an important piece of the regulation which mandates that firms demonstrate that they provided the best price available to clients for trade execution. 

Congratulations to Candyce Edelen, the president of Kaskad, who attended the CEP conference last year, and Colin Clark, their CTO, on this customer win and public endorsement. 

CEP In Manufacturing

We have experienced a recent rise in CEP use cases far afield from capital markets and trading, and we're finding them useful to describe to the community as illustrations of how CEP applies to many domains.

Surely there are enough monitoring and measuring technologies in the manufacturing fields that provide real-time alerting.  Right?  Perhaps not.  There are three recurring patterns that we see around the interest and introduction of Apama into manufacturing (and maybe more broadly issues of logistics, distribution and retail, like our customer BGN, who have automated their bookstore operations with Apama.  Read the BGN case study here). 

1.  Correlate events from multiple streams - sensors from plant floor devices, human input devices, ERP transaction systems - in real time

2.  Monitor scenarios across sliding time windows.  This has only been possible thru constant database polling. Hence its inherent latency (store-query-analyze, store-query-analyze etc etc) and is again post-facto.

3. The need to act, not just monitor.  As the need to tighten efficiencies and eliminate waste from manufacturing cycles gets more and more vital, Apama allows manufacturers to gain real-time insight into the impact of one cause (one or more events) on different processes.  Most importantly it allows them to ACT as the situation is developing rather than just use data in a post-mortem.

A vendor of plant monitoring software is using Apama to implement the following specific time-based logic:

In a plant producing a particular household product in containers, a container filling line is being monitored for fill weights within a +/- range of acceptance. The filling lines have in-line scales that monitor the fill weights. Containers that are not within this range are ejected from the filling process and recorded within the Apama correlator. If the frequency exceeds a user-defined tolerance an event or multiple events may be triggered such as an audible alarm, and/or a signal light is turned on, or the line itself could be stopped.

These examples are just a few of the things we're seeing in manufacturing.  Relative to trading, CEP adoption is early, but as we discover new use cases, we'll keep posting.

Finamex Selects Progress Apama

The timing worked out very well for this announcement that Finamex has selected Apama.  This is yet another public commitment of a very important financial institution in Mexico, which has selected Progress Apama as their event processing platform for their algorithmic trading operations.  In this release, you can see a connection to previous releases and announcements of CEP adoption globally - this one in Mexico, and previous ones, like Koscom in Asia. 

Microsoft, Apama, and MiFID

A few weeks ago, we announced a partnership with Microsoft.  There has been great interest in this development, and John, Giles and  Mark had  a ton of press interviews.   I guess any time you have Microsoft included in an announcement it's big news, and we're happy for the exposure and the exposure of course, for CEP overall.