Nimbus is the new “process discovery” technology in the TIBCO stack. I believe “process discovery” is somewhat understating the Nimbus capabilities: they describe the processes that are then used as real-time guidance (and control) by the “shopfloor workers”. One of the key success stories they talk about is Carphone Warehouse (UK’s Best Buy affiliate, and already a TIBCO CEP user) which resulted in 25+% improvements in customer satisfaction. So in effect, Nimbus can be as transformational to an organization’s manual processes as CEP is to an organizations automated processes. At TUCON we got a good overview of what Nimbus provides.
Of course, one of the interesting topics here is how this very people-focused way of defining business processes (so much so that even a standard notation for analysts like BPMN is usually eschewed) relates to the complex events that a CEP service may provide. I believe the benefits of CEP to Nimbus are as for any other BPM component:
provide information (as complex events) to support business processes- invoke (/engage) the workers or actors in the business process
- be invoked on demand to do some particular event processing
- monitor the processing of such business processes (performance monitoring etc)
However, thats just my opinion – the Nimbus guys of course also consider the “Power of Events” for their users…
For another view of the Nimbus session check out Sendy Kemsley’s blog.
