by Matt Asay, C|Net News.com

On Monday, Orbitz Worldwide plans to announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite. Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday’s announcement will add significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry.  …

ERMA and Graphite are “part of a Complex Event Processing system designed to monitor large distributed applications, analyze the data that is gathered and display that data in real-time graphs.”

Matt O’Keefe: “As the Internet continues to evolve with more and more interconnections, the complexity of the whole is increasing over time. This is why complex event processing is so suitable to this growing problem. It lets us take an enormous amount of data from our data center and boil it down to the essentials: One message that says a customer’s attempt failed because of “X,” and the source is “Y.” Our operations people shouldn’t have to learn each of the seven layers of our architecture. They should just receive an easy-to-understand message from the system that makes it easy to solve the problem.”

But why open source? What benefits does Orbitz derive from open-sourcing these projects? Why not keep ERMA and Graphite to themselves?  Read the report.

by K. Mani Chandy and Michael Olson
California Institute of Technology
Event-driven applications that are constructed as compositions of Web applications offer significant benefits. Just as mashups compose Web services to create added value, so too can compositions of event-driven applications create added value.

This article first reviews concepts about event driven applications, sense & respond systems, and presents metrics for evaluating and comparing such systems; then a few examples of federated Web applications are presented; and finally two examples of Business Application Monitoring (BAM) dashboards dealing with politics and with startup companies are presented as illustrations.

Download the article - Federated Event Systems: The Event Web (768kB)

David Luckham and Roy Schulte

The latest version of the Complex Event Processing Glossary (May 2008) is published here. We thank all those who commented on previous versions. Those comments have helped and influenced the present version. We expect the glossary to be updated annually to reflect further comments and suggestions.

We are considering how best to incorporate additional terminology that might apply to specialized areas and topics in event processing, for example, SOA or EDA. Perhaps special terminology subsections might be an alternative to a simple “flat” extension? Suggestions on how to do this are welcome.

Please find the Complex Event Processing Glossary 2008 here for your comment.

Episode six of The Complex Events Podcast is now online, brought to you by Voices in Business and sponsored by BEA Systems. Today’s show features an interview with David Luckham, Research Professor of Electrical Engineering (Emeritus) at Stanford University.

Professor Luckham is often referred to as “the Father of CEP”. He has held faculty and invited faculty positions in both mathematics and computer science at eight major universities in Europe and the United States, led the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford University, and was one of the founders of Rational Software, Inc. In his latest book “The Power of Events“, he provides an introduction to complex event processing.

In this, the first part of a two-part interview, David shares his thoughts on CEP and how it compares and works with SOA and business oriented architecture as he speaks with Vicki Zesses of Voices in Business and David Fergie, Principal Architect at BEA Systems. Read more…

by Jeffrey Schwartz, RedmondDeveloper, June 20th 2008.

The subprime meltdown that has roiled the financial markets since last fall will negatively impact the amount large investment houses, banks and brokerages will spend on IT overall — and on software development projects in particular — in the coming years.That was the assessment at last week’s annual Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) conference in New York, which drew more than 7,000 IT professionals and developers….

According to Tabb, spending on development is being refocused on projects that can help firms improve their margins and, not surprisingly, do a better job at risk management. As such, investments in capabilities such as algorithmic trading and complex event processing (CEP) are likely to be pivotal in some firms’ efforts to become more competitive and improve their efforts at mitigating risks. Article.

Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast
by Matt Richtel, New York Times
The onslaught of cellphone calls and e-mail and instant messages is fracturing attention spans and hurting productivity. It is a common complaint. But now the very companies that helped create the flood are trying to mop it up.

Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge. See NYT article. Maybe CEP can help, or not? Check out the IORG. Are they really serious?

by Tom Lubinski, SL Corporation.

Abstract – Business Activity Monitoring Applications are becoming increasingly common and sophisticated. Much can be learned about the analysis and visualization of real-time data from comparisons with previous generations of process monitoring and telemetry systems. While there are similarities, there are also significant differences in the technology involved in the handling of real-time data. This paper discusses practical issues regarding the analysis and visualization of real-time data in BAM applications. Further, it will discuss how lessons learned from the process control industry’s decades of experience in providing real-time visibility can be applied today to deliver more effective and successful BAM solutions for the enterprise.

Download the article - Business Activity Monitoring: Process Control For the Enterprise (PDF 1.2mb).

Posted by Dana Gardner, ZDNet, June 4, 2008

The recent growth — and expected spike — in business event data in enterprises has led a group of IT industry leaders to form the Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS), designed to encourage adoption and effective use of event processing methods and technology in applications.

Among the founding members are such heavy hitters as IBM, Oracle, TIBCO Software, Inc., Gartner Research, Coral8 Inc., Progress Software, and StreamBase. Read the complete report on ZDNet- Spike in enterprise ‘events’ spurs debut of EPTS.

reported by Joe McKendrick, ZDNet

This week, a report out of the Financial Times (cited here in the LA Times) said that a bug used in the computer models used by analysts at Moody’s Investors Service caused Moody’s to award “incorrect triple-A ratings to billions of dollars worth of a type of complex debt product.” The report alleges that the errors were not corrected even after the code was fixed a year ago.

The implication is that millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars in investment decisions may have been made on faulty data generated by the system. If you’ve been following the financial markets lately, it was not a good time for that.

This once again raises the question of how risky is it to take humans out of the loop of event processing? Of course, humans are fallible, and usually create the messes we then look to technology to fix. …

David Luckham joined Dr. K. Mani Chandy, Rodney Morrison, and Beth Gold-Bernstein for an informative panel discussion on the relationship between EDA (Event Driven Architecture) and SOA. Read Joe Mckendrick’s report.

Real-time analysis of streaming data is catching on, but industry experts say CEP is still an immature technology.

by Ivy Schmerken, WallStreet & Technology, May 15, 2008

Complex event processing (CEP) is supposedly gaining traction on Wall Street as a way to analyze real-time streams of information and find patterns or correlations in unrelated data. But there are still many myths about the technology and confusion over the terminology, according to last week’s Accelerating Wall Street conference hosted by Wall Street and Technology.

One of the main myths is that the technology is mature. According to panelists, CEP technology is immature. Another myth is that it’s a sell-side only technology. A third myth is that it’s out-of-the box and easy to use.

Read the complete article on wallstreetandtech.com