elemental links

Submissions now Open: Innovative Event Processing Contest by EPTS

The Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) has just announced two Innovative Event Processing Award Programs:

Innovative Event Processing Principles Contest. The contest is open to private persons from all countries as well as to organizations from all from all countries, of all sizes, including government agencies.

The goal of this EPTS contest is to highlight research contributions significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in event processing.
To qualify for the competition, research contributions (like conference or journal articles, doctoral theses, books) should have been published in the past 5 years, or accepted for publication in the last 12 months. Submissions by the (co-)authors of the research contribution are welcome.

The nominations will be judged based on: scientific and technical soundness, relevance to event processing, originality, and expected or already achieved impact on event processing.

For more information on the Event Processing Principles Contest, go here.

Innovative Event Processing Application Case Study Contest. This contest, co-sponsored by the OMG’s Event Processing CoP, is open to organizations of all sizes, including government agencies, which have delivered, or are developing, an innovative event processing application.

The goal of the contest is to highlight applications showing significant and innovative use of event processing. To qualify for the competition, the nominated application should have been developed in the past 5 years.

Entries will be judged on the innovative use and potential or realized value from this application.  Evaluation committee members are: Alex Alves (Oracle), Francois Bry (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich), Mani Chandy (California Institute of Technology), Opher Etzion (IBM), Brenda Michelson (Elemental Links), Themis Palpanas (Trento University)

For more information on the Event Processing Application Contest, go here.

Submissions for both contests must be received by September 30, 2010. Winners will be announced during the EPTS annual conference in November 17-19, 2010.

[Disclosures: As an EP-TS member, I worked on the committee that devised the EP Application Contest questionnaire.  That same committee will be evaluating EP Application Contest submissions.  The OMG’s EP CoP is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

O’Reilly Radar: What is Data Science?

Mike Loukides has an excellent piece on O’Reilly Radar entitled “What is data science?”  In the article, Loukides covers making data products, the data lifecyle, working with data at scale (Big Data), story telling and data scientists. 

Throughout the article, Loukides introduces the reader to many data science concepts, tools, experts and skills.

Calling out several items, I love the “data exhaust” term:

“These recommendations are "data products" that help to drive Amazon's more traditional retail business. They come about because Amazon understands that a book isn't just a book, a camera isn't just a camera, and a customer isn't just a customer; customers generate a trail of "data exhaust" that can be mined and put to use, and a camera is a cloud of data that can be correlated with the customers' behavior, the data they leave every time they visit the site.”

I think this “make lemonade” sentiment on data quality is crucial:

“Once you've parsed the data, you can start thinking about the quality of your data. Data is frequently missing or incongruous. If data is missing, do you simply ignore the missing points? That isn't always possible. If data is incongruous, do you decide that something is wrong with badly behaved data (after all, equipment fails), or that the incongruous data is telling its own story, which may be more interesting? It's reported that the discovery of global warming was delayed because automated data collection tools discarded readings that were too low 1. In data science, what you have is frequently all you're going to get. It's usually impossible to get "better" data, and you have no alternative but to work with the data at hand.”

The big data definition is excellent.  It’s about the problem, not the (product) solutions:

“The most meaningful definition I've heard: "big data" is when the size of the data itself becomes part of the problem. We're discussing data problems ranging from gigabytes to petabytes of data. At some point, traditional techniques for working with data run out of steam.”

And the information platforms / dataspaces concept ties to my active information tier:

“What are we trying to do with data that's different? According to Jeff Hammerbacher 2 (@hackingdata), we're trying to build information platforms or dataspaces. Information platforms are similar to traditional data warehouses, but different. They expose rich APIs, and are designed for exploring and understanding the data rather than for traditional analysis and reporting. They accept all data formats, including the most messy, and their schemas evolve as the understanding of the data changes.”

If you want to learn something today, read the article. Then bookmark it for future reference.

@ Tibco TUCON: Real-time Retail, Using Information to Improve Customer Satisfaction

I’m at a CIO Innovations session.  Randy G. Burdick, EVP and CIO of OfficeMax, is going to present on real-time retail.  As a former retailer, who introduced real-time, event-driven architecture to the organization, I’m extremely interested to learn what OfficeMax has done.  According to the session abstract, OfficeMax’s “2-second advantage” story involves inventory levels, fulfillment processes, shipping, customer notification and customer loyalty.

OfficeMax is the combined entities of OfficeMax retail and Boise Cascade Office Supplies business.  Burdick opened with some background on OfficeMax and the challenges of the current retail environment.  These include declining sales & margins, changes in shopping habits (cross channel engagement, social media, Red Laser on the iPhone, etc) and green initiatives.

OfficeMax challenges in 2005, when Burdick joined the organization, included supply chain efficiencies, cross-channel customer behavior and interactions, lack of real-time information, compliance and risk management (PCI, fraud, confidential data), revenue growth and margin enhancement.  And of course, the spaghetti IT diagram slide.

IT Approach to these challenges:

- Educate and upgrade IT staff

- Establish and Mature an SOA Practice

- Establish business investment practices – strategic use of IT

The SOA slide, Tibco bus in the middle, ties core systems, customer systems, reporting etc.

Establishing the SOA Practice: Strategies for versioning, testing, monitoring, service design, security, deployment, performance tuning, capacity planning, backup and recovery.  Frameworks for testing, business metrics, error handling, deployment.  Processes: estimating, repository, service definition, etc.  People: training, offshore partnering and more…

Burdick said Tibco was ESB #2.  First attempt, prior to his tenure, was purely integration based.  [Resource vs. Business-driven] This was failure.

Architecture included business events and business process management.  EP examples: store sales, distributing item information.

Key: Prioritize by Business Value, not IT Value

Benefits: Accelerate development timeline, improved availability and performance, reduced costs, enabled business capabilities that in the past were cost prohibitive, real-time business metrics for any information flowing through Tibco, project teams now see value of bus, ask to use it.

Beyond the Basics

- Order out of stock items from POS

- Predictive monitoring of core business processes – order fulfillment

- Real-time analysis of business transactions – product affinity, hot sellers, proactive inventory response, price error check

- Cross Channel analysis

In closing, “Be Prepared – You get one chance”.

Audience Q&A

1. What Products?  Just the service bus.  [Not sure how that ties to BPM, then.  Definitely can do simple EDA with just a bus.]

2. What were the major changes to people and process?  Started in IT.  Established architecture.  Brought in outside people to form a core team.  Started with central team, throttled back demand, tested concepts, established frameworks. 

After 18 months, opened practice to other projects.  Had innovation and reuse rewards.  Lastly, frameworks on automated testing, repositories really allowed momentum gain.  Now, SOA has taken off organically.  Two to three year process to get people (IT) excited about SOA and value.

3. Business value?  Business responsiveness is the big driver, more so than cost savings.

Cloud Computing Environments, Events & Event Clouds: Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)

Here we go.  Event Processing and Cloud Computing are natural allies.  Events can be used in the monitoring, notification, and adjustment of cloud computing environments (CCE), and in the monitoring, notification, adjustment of, and in response to, the business capabilities running on those CCEs.   As I’ve mentioned numerous times, I believe event-based data integration will be critical to information, and therefore, business synchronization. 

In addition to being an event generator, and responder, cloud computing can also be a highly efficient, scalable, event processing platform.  For proof, just ask my friend Colin Clark at Cloud Event Processing.

So, it’s with no surprise, but great expectations, that I’m noting the beta release of Amazon’s Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).  From the Amazon service page:

“Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a highly scalable, flexible, and cost-effective capability to publish messages from an application and immediately deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon SNS provides a simple web services interface that can be used to create topics you want to notify applications (or people) about, subscribe clients to these topics, publish messages, and have these messages delivered over clients’ protocol of choice (i.e. HTTP, email, etc.). Amazon SNS delivers notifications to clients using a “push” mechanism that eliminates the need to periodically check or “poll” for new information and updates. Amazon SNS can be leveraged to build highly reliable, event-driven workflows and messaging applications without the need for complex middleware and application management. The potential uses for Amazon SNS include monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, mobile applications, and many others. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.”

From the SNS Functionality Overview, the service appears to be cloud based publish-subscribe:

• “Create a topic: A topic is an “access point” – identifying a specific subject or event type – for publishing messages and allowing clients to subscribe for notifications.
• Set policies for your topic: Once a topic is created, the topic owner can set policies for it such as limiting who can publish messages or subscribe to notifications, or specifying which notification protocols will be supported (i.e. HTTP/HTTPS, email). A single topic can support notification deliveries over multiple transport protocols.
• Add subscribers to a topic: Subscribers are clients interested in receiving notifications from topics of interest; they can directly subscribe to a topic or be subscribed by the topic owner. Subscribers specify the protocol format and end-point (URL, email address, etc.) for notifications to be delivered. Upon receiving a subscription request, Amazon SNS will send a confirmation message to the specified end-point, asking the subscriber to explicitly opt-in to receiving notifications from that topic. Opting-in can be done by calling an API, using a command line tool, or – for email notifications – simply clicking on a link.
• Publish messages / send out notifications: When topic owners have updates they wish to notify their subscribers about, they publish those messages to the topic – which immediately triggers Amazon SNS to deliver this message to all applicable subscribers.”

Of the features list, “scalable” caught my attention:

“Scalable – Amazon SNS is designed to meet the needs of the largest and most demanding applications, allowing applications to publish an unlimited number of messages at any time.”

Largest and most demanding? Tweets, market data, click-stream, blue mussels, Internet of Things … 

Amazon’s SNS is a springboard to industrial strength event processing and the active information tier.  As I said, “here we go”.

[Cross posted from Elemental Cloud Computing, because it’s Event Processing too.]

Event Processing Symposium 2010: Call for Participation

The Event Processing Symposium 2010 program committee, in cooperation with the OMG, today issued a Call for Participation for Event Processing Symposium 2010: Profiting from Continuous Intelligence, to be held in Washington DC, on May 24 and 25, 2010. Submissions are due by April 15, 2010. 

At the Event Processing Symposium 2010, attendees will:

• Learn how Event Processing enables agencies and corporations to profit from continuous intelligence at the Event Processing Symposium 2010, hosted by the new Event Processing Community of Practice.
• Hear from industry pioneers, leading vendors, and early adopters on Event Processing technologies and techniques that increase mission and business visibility and responsiveness.
• Interact with industry experts, leading adopters, and peers in roundtable discussions on business analysis, information analysis, management techniques, and technologies to create an environment for continuous intelligence.
• Influence, participate in, and benefit from the rise of event processing as we launch the Event Processing Community of Practice

Join our distinguished conference program of event processing luminaries, pioneers and early implementers, including Gartner Distinguished Analyst Roy Schulte, Sabre Airline Solutions’ Christopher Bird, and Cloud Event Processing’s Colin Clark.

Submissions

The submission deadline is April 15, 2010.  Submissions are welcome for the following topics:

• Case Studies utilizing Event Processing technologies and techniques
• Event Processing Technology Landscape
• Event Processing Thinking and Analysis Techniques
• Current and Future Use Cases for Event Processing
• Mission and Business Implications of Sense and Respond Approaches
• Event Processing and Related Approaches: SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and Business Analytics
• Event Processing in 2015: Business, Methodology, Technology, and Standards

Please note, submissions that are direct pitches for product or services will not be considered.  Submissions should be prepared in English, containing the following information:

• Presenter name, title and affiliation
• Presenter Bio
• Session Title
• 2 - 3 paragraph description of proposed session
• 3 - 5 bullets on what attendees will learn
• Target audience characteristics: role, skill and industry

Submit abstracts as described above to Program Chair Brenda M. Michelson [me] via e-mail.

 

[Disclosure: The OMG is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]