RulesFest moved to Burlingame (still Bay Area, CA USA) where arrivees on Sunday (like myself) initially had the minor shock of finding themselves in a tatoo artist conference (complete with anti-gang police presence, apparently!). Luckily they had moved on by Monday, avoiding potentially embarrassing delegate mix-ups…
A few CEP-related sessions today:
- IBM’s Daniel Selman looked at the various technology combination patterns of “Executing Processes, Taking Decisions and Detecting Situations”. Daniel discussed the stateful (short-term) CEP versus stateful (long-term) BPM versus stateless decisions, which is an interesting (if over simplistic IMHO) viewpoint that aligns, funnily enough, with IBM product division demarcation! [Also reported on here]
- Paul Haley gave a keynote on the “Roadmap for Rules, Semantics and Business” covering the future of knowledge processing, with honorable mentions to the Japanese 5th Gen computer project (highlight of the AI era), IBM’s Watson (text processing engine), and his own work with Paul Allen ‘s Vulcan company’s Project Halo and the “Scalable Inference for Large Knowledge” engine (SILK). Paul also commented on the need for rule standards to avoid the mantra that as soon as knowledge is encoded it becomes “code” and therefore only manipulatable by “coders” – an interesting point as languages like OWL are not at all business friendly. He also viewed OMG SBVR as being more important as a logic formalism for this reason. [Also reported on here]
- Fred McClimans presented on Rules and Human Behavior – and specifically on the causality of human events. This is the other dimension of event analysis, in this case supporting information flows across communities / tribes / crowds. Modeling information flows in human systems was somewhat scuppered by what Fred described as “pervasive hyperconnectivity” – the fact that communities communicate across conventional boundaries (for example using Twitter).
- Mauricio Salatino presented on “Emergency Services – Processes Rules and Events” where he had used Drools (and a nifty simulation UI reminding me of a computer game) to provide an emergency response system. [Also reported on here]
My presentation simply re-iterated some of the results from customers’ use of TIBCO CEP technologies as presented at TIBCO’s user group (TUCON) as previously blogged. The main points were:
– Event-driven decisions are increasingly important in corporations. [For the TLA challenged, you can view this as the growth of EDD to support EDA (Event Driven Decisions and Architecture respectively)].
– Traditional BRMS strengths are not necessarily required (proprietary repository etc) – some customers exploit tools like Sharepoint and exploiting events to pass rules around (Event-based Rules Management).
– More “classic” business rule users like insurance companies are also finding value in CEP.
[Also reported on here].
