Another TUCON keynote today was FedEx’s Robert Carter, CIO. Robert gave a great intro into the increasing importance of real-time event processing, painting the timeline of FedEx from the introduction of the first scanner in 1979 and Fred Smith’s quote on “the information about the package is as important as the package itself”. This history also covered the exploitation of middleware (TIBCO EMS) in 2002 and another goal for FedEx IT… “we have to be zero latency”.
Today FedEx deal with 2Bn transactions per day and 10+Petabytes of data. Robert said they “… need event decision capabilities”, and so are now moving to event-oriented systems (including TIBCO BusinessEvents). When you have a parcel travelling down a conveyor at 400ft per min (>120m per min) you definitely need to make your decisions fast!
