Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) Symposium take-aways

Before I fully immerse myself in the SOA Consortium this week, I wanted to augment my "reporting" on last week's EPTS symposium with a little analysis.

My EPTS Take-Aways

True Industry Collaboration - As Opher mentioned, 41 of the 70 attendees were event processing vendors, representing a many of the technology providers in the space: Aleri, Coral8, Event Zero, IBM, iLog, Nastel, Oracle, Progress Apama, RuleML, Streambase, Tibco, and West Global.  What impressed me is these vendors attended the symposium not to one up each other, but to work together to move both the technology and market forward.  While I didn't attend the follow-on business meeting, I learned that several new working groups have been proposed to explore important topics including event processing languages, reference architectures, benchmarks, university curriculums and interoperability.  These are in addition to the current EP glossary and use case efforts.

Cross Industry Applicability - While Capital Markets and "secret agencies" are fertile grounds for event processing applications, the market doesn't begin and end there.  Many participants, myself included, brought forward event processing examples related to business intelligence, business visibility & responsiveness, passenger transportation, freight & logistics, information dissemination, healthcare (epidemic, patient monitoring, RFID in-body monitoring), ambient intelligence (smart homes, smart cities, personalized mobile information systems), workplace safety, homeland security (storm evacuation, first responder systems, terrorism situational awareness, power / fuel / water system monitoring, and environmental systems.

Hype is Relatively Low - I made this point in my panel presentation, and frankly, I think it surprised many of the attendees who are immersed in event processing, and therefore partake in high, but localized hype.  So, for my practitioner readers, I apologize in advance for sparking a hype wave.  However, if the EPTS sticks to its mission, and truly collaborates on (as Seth Grimes mentioned) bringing some 'precision' to the space, then the hype could very well be productive, rather than destructive. 

Forthcoming Battles - Speaking of destructive, two battles are imminent.  One, the language wars: (a) SQL vs. procedural vs. Rules and (b) mine vs. yours.  Second, what are the boundaries of event processing?  Is information dissemination in or out?  Same with sensor applications?  Does it depend on the use of an event processing engine?  As Mani Chandy asked, is event processing the engine, or the result?

Early for Standards - While standards are good for practitioners and market adoption, standards for standards sake are a mistake.  And yes, I am thinking of the 'early and often' delivery of WS* standards as I type this.  So, in a way, I was relieved to hear that EPTS isn't knocking down the doors of standards bodies with 'must haves'.  However, I hope the group doesn't back burner the standards conversation, because if they don't take the lead, someone else might, and that could be troublesome for all parties.

 

[Disclosure: None of the vendors mentioned in this post are current clients of Elemental Links, but that can change ;-) ]