News

Event-Driven Business Process Management and its Practical Application Taking the Example of DHL

Complex Events News - Tue, 2008-11-18 15:11
by Rainer von Ammon , Christoph Emmersberger, Florian Springer, Christian Wolff The recently coined term “Event-Driven Business Process Management” (EDBPM) is a combination of actually two different disciplines: Business Process Management (BPM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). The common understanding behind BPM is that each company’s unique way of doing business is captured in its business [...]
Categories: Event Processing

Predictive Analytics and Complex Event Processing Technology Move to Cutting Edge of Financial Services Industry

Complex Events News - Tue, 2008-11-18 14:50
As data volumes continue to rise, bankers, insurers and traders are leveraging predictive models to anticipate future behavior and events. By Nathan Conz and Melanie Rodier As data volumes continue to rise, firms are adopting increasingly complex predictive analytics models to analyze the large data streams and anticipate future behavior and events. And, instead of [...]
Categories: Event Processing

Why Hierarchical Event Processing Rocks

RuleCore - Tue, 2008-11-18 11:40

Many event processing tools and engines contains some kind of processing element which takes events as input and produces events as output.
Currently* there seems to be to two concepts which are popular among the CEP tool vendors. There’s the SQL based approach, and the rule based approach. Both normally share the powerful mechanism of taking events as input and producing events as output.

The processing elements, SQL queries or rules, can as a result of this easily be organized in hierarchies. Organizing things in hierarchies is certainly nothing new. But I would like to show how powerful hierarchies are when applied within event processing.

I’m a bit surprised that there have not been more talk about hierarchical event processing in the CEP community. It’s a concept which is worth explaining in detail to CEP users.

Recently we have created a geofencing application using ruleCore, or rather the new geospatial ruleCore. It’s intended for fleet management, mobile asset management, telematics and all kind of location based solutions which need a quick alert capability to immediately get notification about unexpected vehicle behaviour.

We used rules organized in a hierarchy to implement all the geofence logic:

This hierarchy of rules allowed us rapidly to create the initial types of geofences found in the requirements list. It gives us a nice structure which can easily be extended when we add new types of geofences, like the off-route (Alert when a vehicle is not following its designated route) geofence we added recently.

It also allows us to add new rules in a modular fashion to monitor a specific property of a geofence. For example, there are rules which monitor some of the geofences and create alerts they are not triggered during a specified period. Great for arrival and departure alerts.

At the bottom level we feed the rule hierarchy with the GPS positions. The Level 1 rules trigger when the vehicle is within a zone. Level 2 in turn has rules which trigger when a vehicle is considered to entered a zone, which is not the same as being inside the zone.

In this way the events go from simple low level position update events to rather high level events at the upper level.

So for your next (or first) event processing project, spend some time in the design process and try to see if your rules are naturally hierarchical. If organized in this way you have a flexible and powerful abstraction which also tends to be easy to understand and explain to new crew members.

Most of the time the levels can also be give descriptive names as each level tends to handle rules at a certain abstraction level. For example, monitoring a web site and its infrastructure could use rules on four levels:

  • Level 0 - Network
  • Level 1 - Servers
  • Level 3 - Services
  • Level 4 - Tasks
  • Level 5 - Business Processes

and so on.

Each level can emit alert events to the outside world in addition to the level above. This would allow for example the network manager to only listen to events from level 0 in the above example.

* The current set of vendors would obviously want you to believe that the current tools are mature and there are nothing new coming just around the corner, that is: buy now, don’t wait. But the event processing market is a very young one. The concepts are new. We are lightyear away for anything called mainstream and don’t even think of finding standards. In the years to come I’m sure there will be new and interesting concepts (which will not carry the legacy of SQL or rules) and implementations created for specially for event processing. The current tools are inspired by existing research and uses extensions to the SQL concept and the concept of rules. If we were to start over with a clean sheet I’m sure there would be more exiting tools than the current generation.

Categories: Event Processing

Oracle Unveils New Event-Driven Middleware Suite

Complex Events News - Tue, 2008-11-18 10:00
The Enhanced Suite Illustrates Rapid Unification of BEA Technology with Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware and Features Complex Event Processing Capabilities.  Enhancements featured in the new release of Oracle EDA Suite and Oracle CEP include: distributed and local event caching, including tight integration to Oracle Coherence’s distributed data caching services; event record and playback; a visualizer administration console; [...]
Categories: Event Processing

The Value of (Production) Rules …

TIBCO CEP Blog - Mon, 2008-11-17 15:54

Some people seem to be quite surprised to find that TIBCO BusinessEvents, classed as a Complex Event Processing product, includes a “rule engine”. Especially those that look at the CEP tools market and just see the stream-based CEP products doing continuous queries. Nonethless, there are good reasons why a production rule engine is ideal not just for business decisions, but also event filtering and correlation.

First, lets classify “rules” and “production rules”. Production rules are a type of rule that represent an “IF THEN” statement, but typically applied not to single data variables, but to classes of data (and events). Many commercial rule engines, including BusinessEvents, use developments of the Rete algorithm devised in the 1970s as an efficient pattern matching algorithm for dealing with multiple patterns and multiple data elements. The rule engines that use this algorithm typically provide “forward chaining” in that any rule’s action can update data tested in some other rule, and the rule engine can automatically fire the new rule too. The “interesting” aspect of this is that the rule engine determines when rules fire, not the programmer ordering the rules in some way. For this reason, production rules in rule engines are considered “declarative” - their execution is independent of the order they are defined, which makes design-time scalability easier. Needless to say, the Rete algorithm means that the cost of adding rules to a system is not linear - twice the rules take far less than twice the space and far less than twice the execution time.

The fact that production rules are defined in terms of classes adds another dimension in flexibility. These “declarations” in BusinessEvents, or RuleVariables in the OMG PRR standard, add runtime scalability - the same rule can execute for 1 or 1000 instances of a class, without any additional configuration.

So there are 3 basic parts of a (production) rule (used in a Rete-type rule engine): declaration/RuleVariables, condition, and action:

  • Declarations extend the “scope” of a rule.
    The declaration is a list of event types and classes to be used in the rule. At runtime each declaration matches against every instance (and the rule is therefore effectively compared to every combination of instances - or RuleVariable tuples).
    Example: a declaration of CustomerCallEvent and ActiveCustomer for 2 CustomerCallEvents and 50 Customers will create 100 possible combinations or tuples to be considered. Adding a declaration of CustomerOrder with 100 instances increases this to 10,000 combinations or tuples.
    This illustrates both the flexibility and potential cost of production rules - although of course the Rete algorithm can scale to very large tuple numbers.
  • Conditions limit the “scope” of a rule.
    The declarations are filtered and joined in the conditions. At runtime each combination of declated event types and data classes is filtered and joined to see if the rule is valid (and what instances of declarations pass the condition list).
    Example: we may filter CustomerCallEvents to just those that are order-related, and associate them with the relevant ActiveCustomer and CustomerOrder. Only 1 CustomerCallEvent is order-related, matches to only 1 ActiveCustomer, and 2 CustomerOrders. Therefore we end up with 1 x 1 x 2 valid tuples or (potential) rule firings.
    This illustrates how we can combine events and data in multiple ways, irrespective of event arrival order. Indeed, if we want to test a particular ordering of events, we have to add an explicit condition to handle that requirement.
  • Actions execute the resultant event processing action or decision for a rule.
    Typically, the actions will be executed for each set of declarations (tuple) that satisfy the condition part. Note that there is one additional runtime possibility here: the action for 1 instance can update the data used by another, making the condition fail.
    Example: the action for the CustomerCallEvent and associated ActiveCustomer for the first CustomerOrder handles the event satisfactorily, abstracting it to a new event, and the action “consumes” (removes) the CustomerCallEvent. This means that the 2nd rule firing (for the same CustomerCallEvent and ActiveCustomer, but the 2nd CustomerOrder) is no longer valid as the CustomerCallEvent no longer exists. So this rule does not fire a 2nd time, in this case.
    This illustrates the dynamic nature of rule processing. Where the rule also creates new events or updates existing data instances, then new rule firings may become possible (rule declarations and conditions become valid). This process, and the subsequent firing of other rules, is called rule inferencing.
  • In addition, rules may have names, priority numbers and other metadata. Rule priorities are to aid in “conflict resolution”, a fancy term for what happens when 2 or more rules are valid to fire: which do we want to fire first?

For event processing purposes, the production rule format and inferencing rule engine has a number of advantages:

  1. Declarative rule definitions: I do not need to worry about the order I define my rules as this has no effect on their execution (except possibly where 2 rules can fire at the same time and I have not specified any priority - which normally means I don’t care). Adding new rules simply means adding them to a list, rather than worrying about where they need to be placed to be executed.
  2. Efficient declaration-based definitions: defining rules at the class level makes for generic rules that scale regardless of the number of instances I expect them to match against - indeed I may not know at design time the number of instances expected at runtime.
  3. Efficient pattern matching for rule conditions: the Rete-algorithm ensures (mostly) that runtime performance for event patterns, data patterns, and mixed event-data patterns is very good. All vendors have optimized their pattern matching for maximum performance (TIBCO is no exception with a combined code generation and Rete approach).
  4. Dynamic pattern behavior: condition filter statements can be defined as variables (or in BusinessEvents, scorecard entries) and adjusted on-the-fly by monitoring the results of other rules and processing.

So production rules enable the definition of arbitrarily complex and numerous event patterns. When combined with an event-aware rule engine, production rules provide an Event Condition Action (ECA) rule mechanism combining the features of business rule engines with event-driven behavior. The rules can represent basic raw event processing, complex (abstract) event processing, and event-based decision processing - using rulesets to differentiate these as appropriate! They can be combined with mechanisms like state models and query languages. They are a proven technology, and they work well.

Other References:

Earlier posts covered the value of state modeling to CEP, the differences between rules and decisions and decisions and CEP [*1], and CEP vs BREs and BRMSs.

Notes:

[1] The difference between event-processing rules, event-driven rules, and rules for business decisions has been much-blogged-about. See these blogs by JT (twice!), Opher and Marco - the latter 2 pretty much covering the other, albeit ECA-based, rule-based CEP systems. In summary, of course,  event-processing rules, event-driven rules, and rules for business decisions can all overlap, depending on the application.

Categories: Event Processing

FX: A CEP Success Story

Apama CEP Blog - Mon, 2008-11-17 12:49
One of the questions that sometimes comes up in our meetings with prospective clients is "Why should I buy your whizz-bang CEP platform to do and then build on top of it when I can go... Richard Bentley
Categories: Event Processing

Apama & CQG - Partnering for Low Latency Futures Execution

Apama CEP Blog - Mon, 2008-11-17 12:49
The 24th Annual FIA Futures & Options Expo took place in Chicago this week in and we used that venue to announce an Apama partnership with CQG. A quite significant player in the Futures trading market, CQG offers real time... Chris Martins
Categories: Event Processing

Apama Capital Markets Framework

Apama CEP Blog - Mon, 2008-11-17 12:49
There can be a tendency to presume that CEP???s early adoption in Capital Markets has been predicated solely on the performance characteristics of CEP engines. Though performance is clearly a key attribute for these systems, it is far from the... Chris Martins
Categories: Event Processing

CEP, EDA and SOA

Apama CEP Blog - Mon, 2008-11-17 12:49
I???d like to add my voice to the debate this week (here, here and here) on how Complex Event Processing (CEP) fits into the wider software architectural themes of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Event Driven Architectures (EDA). Although I... Giles Nelson
Categories: Event Processing

The Financial Meltdown and the impact on CEP

Apama CEP Blog - Mon, 2008-11-17 12:49
Watching, waiting, wondering are the catch phrases of late. What will be the eventual conclusion of the meltdown and subsequent bailout of our financial system? Like many of you, I've been steadfast in my search for information, watching the news,... Louis Lovas
Categories: Event Processing

FX: A CEP Success Story

Apama CEP Blog - Fri, 2008-11-14 20:39

One of the questions that sometimes comes up in our meetings with prospective clients is "Why should I buy your whizz-bang CEP platform to do <insert use case here> and then build on top of it when I can go get a shrink-wrap app that does most what I want straight off?". Of course, this is a very easy question to answer: "If you can get an app that does what you want now, and you're confident it will meet your requirements as they evolve going forward, play nice with your existing systems, and the price is right, then why are you wasting time talking to us?". Marc Adler said as much recently with his comments on Risk Management systems, which were right on the money.

Of course, this answer is really an open incitement to the audience to start a discussion about what they really need - now and in the future - and often (more often than not in my experience) it is soon apparent that there is no app out there which will do all, or even most, of what they need - and extending a shrink wrap app to do that is often more work and pain, if it's possible at all, than building it themselves.

So here the salesperson will introduce the core value proposition of an open CEP platform; the ability to support existing and future requirements, to meet the underpinning performance requirements, the necessary resilience, to provide the connectivity, and - vitally - the tooling to allow the same vendor-supported and maintained technology to be applied to the client's constantly evolving needs, with rapid time-to-market. In short, the salesperson emphasizes the benefits of a more "strategic", platform-based approach to solving the client's short and longer-term requirements and - if the salesperson has done his homework and read his audience right - that one-size-fits-all shrink wrap approach is often consigned to the trash.

The nice thing about this approach is that there's no sleight of hand here; every word of the pitch is true.

Let's look at the use of Apama within Foreign Exchange (FX). We've blogged previously about how Apama is being used extensively for real-time FX rate Aggregation and algorithmic execution; just last week our latest client to go live - Standard Chartered - talked publically about their deployment of Apama for their FX spot dealing. We've built a Solution Accelerator to offer relevant but customizable connectivity, algorithms, monitoring and dealing GUIs out of the box. We've even won awards (ok, enough already!). However, although we're (clearly) not shy about trumpeting the power of our offering in this area, the more telling aspect of our deployments - and the aspect of relevance for this article - is not what clients do with our Aggregator; it's what they do *next*.

I was visiting one of our large Tier 1 banking clients in New York a couple of weeks back. They've been using Apama for FX Aggregation for nearly a year now. I walked through the door on to the trading floor and first thing I saw was 3 screens with - unfamiliar - Apama Dashboards on them. "That looks nice" said I (somewhat gormlessly). "Yes, it's our new auto-hedger - it uses the aggregated book feed from your Solution Accelerator and lays off our risk positions over your ECN connections according to a new algo we've built". All developed and running in Apama, extending our Solution Accelerator with new algos and screens - and all unbeknown to me!

I was somewhat more in the loop concerning the work of our friends at one of the world's largest Banks, who have been using Apama for FX Aggregation for well over a year, connecting to multiple liquidity pools to improve their execution. That bank has have recently launched a new FX pricing engine - built with Apama - connecting to their Apama FX Aggregator for real-time pricing, running analytics to derive per-client spreads for market making (similar to how I describe [here]). An auto-hedger is in the works - again extending the initial FX Aggregation deployment and based on the Apama CEP platform. And at least 3 other FX clients have either rolled out or are in the process of rolling out market making solutions as extensions of Apama FX Aggregation deployments (and those are the ones I actually know about!).

Moving beyond auto-hedging and market making, we have a growing number of examples of the benefits of a more strategic "platform" approach, such as Apama clients like ING in Europe taking FX feeds into their Equities Algo systems (also built on Apama) for cross-border spreads (locking in an FX rate as the third leg of the trade), prop shops engaged in currency forward / spot arbitrage, and clients like Louis Capital FX extending their Apama-based FX agency hedging their FX options trading. (As an aside, one the hottest topics for us right now in FX is the area of real-time Forward FX price streaming to large corporates - once the province of the very biggest banks - utilizing real-time volatility and depth of book analytics ...)

The power of the more strategic approach enabled by CEP platforms like Apama, armed with the out-of-the-box connectivity, performance, resilience and tooling, to meet client's current and future needs, is nowhere more ably demonstrated by our experiences in FX.

Categories: Event Processing

CEP as sauce for alphabet soup (Part 10): EC2 and Cloud Computing

TIBCO CEP Blog - Fri, 2008-11-14 11:11

An industry colleague mentioned to me over the Summer that they had attended a “Cloud Computing” talk where it was mentioned that cloud computing would overtake Complex Event Processing. I didn’t get a good response as to what “overtake” meant in this context - that all CEP will be done in cloud computing land? - that cloud computing will overtake CEP in the hype charts (assuming CEP is there anyway)? - that clouds of events will be processed near-source in-the-cloud is the inevitable future for event processing?

To some cynics, cloud computing will be seen purely as a means of delivering virtual server farms, primarily for SaaS (Software As A Service) vendors and their customers, who in turn for the most part are simply part of a renamed ASP (Application Service Provider) market. Amazon’s EC2 seems to be a pretty good example of cloud computing today, and it’s name (”Elastic Compute Cloud”) pretty much describes its function - the virtual mainframe resource for everyone else.

“Computing resources for data / event processing” are a somewhat orthogonal problem to the actual software algorithms used in CEP and event-based decisioning. There is surely no theoretical reason why you could not deploy a CEP application onto EC2 / into a cloud, although latency from event source to the cloud and back again could be an issue, as well as the need for reliable high performance shared data stores. On the latter point, I’m not sure how easy or performant TIBCO BusinessEvents‘ data grid would be on EC2, whose current uses seem almost entirely to be web-service and SOA-based. On the other hand, “the cloud” is possibly a good solution for global-scale event sources, for example as would be found in a large-scale distributed social networking CEP application.

So is there any connection between the terms “event-cloud processing”, as done by CEP, and “cloud computing”? Not particularly, as today the sources of events are not the “same cloud” as the cloud computing centres. On the other hand, I would not be at all surprised to find that the cloud computing architectures relied on event processing techniques to manage users, SLAs and pricing for their systems.

Index

Past alphabet soups have compared CEP to (2) BI, (3) BAM, (4) BPM, (5) BPEL, (6) SOA, (7) SQL, (8) MDM, (9) ETL. Future TLAs are TBA.

Categories: Event Processing

Activation Rules != Decision Rules

RuleCore - Thu, 2008-11-13 10:49

One of the difficult things when it comes to marketing CEP in general and specifically the ruleCore CEP Server is terminology.

The ruleCore CEP Server uses as its main processing concept something we call “rules” or “active rules”. The problem with that is that my rules are not your rules. The odds for misunderstanding me when I talk about rules are astronomical. Rules mean different things to everyone.

But we still call our the thing inside ruleCore for rules, because technically it is an active rule engine. People just hear the rule part and assume that we have a variation of the traditional rule systems based on RETE och similar algorithms. Nothing could be farther away from the truth. And we really can’t blame the customers either, it’s totally our fault as a vendor if customers don’t understand what we are selling. But we don’t have a better name for them so we are kinda stuck with ‘rules’

On the positive side, at least some people, understand what we are up to. There are basically two main kinds of rules in my world:

  • Rules which make decisions for you, or at least tries to help you to make better decisions - not ruleCore
  • Rules which alert you when it is time to make a decision.  - ruleCore

The first ones I would like to call (inspired by James Taylor) Decision Rules,

The second category is something I would like to call Activation Rules.

Both rules are important for a complete solution. The Activation Rule tells you when there is a decision to make and the Decision Rule makes or helps you to make the decision.

The two types of rules solves two different problems:

  • Activation Rules - When should I start my decision process?
  • Decision Rule - What decision should I make?

By using Activation Rules you can start your decision process much more quickly. A real-world example could be to alert an operational fleet manager that a truck is not following its designated route. Without an Activation Rule the fleet manger would manually have to check periodically if all trucks are on track. A Decision Rule would then be used by the fleet manager to decide how to manage the exception.

So my problem is currently how we should communicate this fact to potential buyers. Maybe we should just rename our rules to something else. Or perhaps create a higher level abstraction which we use when talking about the system. The rules could just be an implementation detail.

One particular idea for a marketing message would be to talk only about business event tracking. That’s basically what ruleCore is good at anyway. The rules are just how it is done. For example we could talk about tracking vehicles with GPS or tracking a zone for the presence or absense of a allowed number of containers (also with GPS). Combined with ERP data we can track trucks, business processes and other things as they move around. Might be a good idea, have to think more about this.

Categories: Event Processing

RuleML 2008: Keynotes published…

TIBCO CEP Blog - Thu, 2008-11-13 10:20

Although we contributed one session (on PRR and decisions) to the RuleML conference co-hosted with BR Forum this year, I missed some of the other but nontheless significant talks. I see the keynotes are now officially published, so below are some reviews of the presentations from the web:

  • Michael Kifer of F-logic fame presented on the W3C RIF Rule Interchange Format. This is a nice intro to RIF, by one of its main authors. Interestingly RIF is the logical (pun unintended) successor to much of the old RuleML research work on logic language markups, although somehow I doubt we’ll see RIF08 next year instead. My only contrary thought about this presentation is that, for the wider audience, it could have listed some of the other rule / logic languages currently in progress in the R&D communities, and how they might fit in a hierarchy of RIF dialects.
  • Paul Haley of Automata presented on the need for a merged ontology for process, rules, events and state, extending the ideas he presented in the BRForum session earlier. This presentation directly addressed the CEP community, too:
    • The knowledge management handled by the BRMS community should also impact CEP and BPM…
      • For example, see TIBCO BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager (although we don’t make any specific claims around knowledge management per se, you can see where Paul was heading here).
    • The integration of rules and process is currently inadequate, with rules playing 2nd fiddle to process
      • Funnily enough there was a similar discussion at this week’s BPM Think Tank in the context of semantic BPM versus say rule representations of process (e.g. for the purposes of say verification of process steps, looking for redundancy, etc).
    • Questions whether TIBCO will build a BRMS to compete in BPM…
      • TIBCO BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager already provides a BRMS for event-driven automated processes…
    • PRR is inadequate but probably more important than RIF
      • Certainly PRR 1.0, sans expression language, is “inadequate” compared to what it should provide with a common expression language. To be fair, RIF PRD can be considered (loosely) to be PRR compatible (and mappings should be straightforward), and hopefully they will remain in sync. But PRR could help bridge the semantic gap - for example be used in both CEP and BPM (and SOA) models.
    • Natural language or spreadsheet metaphors are critical
      • So far, TIBCO BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager supports the latter.
    • There is a need for semantic BPM and semantic CEP
      • Researchers tend to agree here, but the customer benefits still need to be proven. Another PhD topic?
    • When will major BPM/CEP/rule vendors have ontologies?
      • Arguably only TIBCO fits in this group (with IBM and Oracle being only “minor” and “too new” in some of these categories). And we are probably more interested in customer / domain ontologies rather than cross-computing-platform ontologies. So far.
  • Ben Grosof of Vulcan presented his latest knowledge representation project, SILK. I didn’t get to speak to Ben about the importance of time and events in knowledge representations, and these are not really covered in his presentation, but I got the impression Ben does understand this.
  • David Luckham of Stanford presented on CEP. David probably should have done a keynote for the main Business Rules Forum rather than just present to the rule markup community. Oh well, maybe next year…

The other presentations are up too. I won’t go through all of them, but in particular note Mark Linehan’s talk on an ontology for time (and thence an ideal basis for a business-level CEP language), and Harold Boley and Ben Craig’s personal agents (using distributed rule systems like BusinessEvents allows). Mark Linehan won the best paper award, justifiably, for his work on mapping SBVR rules (i.e. business policy constraints) to UML classes and OCL (i.e. object constraints) - which will be interesting to compare with Microsoft’s research work in this area.

Categories: Event Processing

BPM TT EU 08: Governance and business motivation

TIBCO CEP Blog - Thu, 2008-11-13 08:20

The 2nd day of the BPM ThinkTank Europe event included a round table session on “process governance”. I am not as familiar as I should be with TIBCO BPM’s governance provisions, but on the Complex Event Processing / Event-Driven Decisions part we support Business Rule Management in TIBCO BusinessEvents 3.0 through a managed, extensible, state-based / rule-driven workflow mechanism. This role-based “process” manages the development / deployment lifecycle for decisions (a.k.a. decision tables) modeled / tested in BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager application. As such, this level of control, beyond simple SCM-based change control functions, is generally more than traditional BRMS / BPMS tools provide (and more than other ESP / CEP tools, of course).

The round table of course was looking at the wider issue of process governance, which is a subset of business governance, which is directly related to business models and controls. The discussion covered management control (or lack thereof) of processes and process improvement, through to possible “best practices”. One of the latter might be corporate adoption of aspects of the BMM or Business Motivation Model, defining the links between business processes, policies and goals. These links can then be used to define the processes around governing change in organizations.

Disclosure - TIBCO is on the Revision committee for OMG BMM 1.1.

Categories: Event Processing

Apama & CQG - Partnering for Low Latency Futures Execution

Apama CEP Blog - Wed, 2008-11-12 17:31
&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Arial; mso-fareast-font-family:&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;Times New Roman&amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;;} span.ccbntxt {mso-style-name:ccbntxt;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

The 24th Annual FIA Futures & Options Expo took place in Chicago this week in and we used that venue to announce an Apama partnership with CQG.  A quite significant player in the Futures trading market, CQG offers real time quotation, charting and technical analysis tools. Via this new partnership, CQG users can now automatically execute trades that have been signaled from within CQG's technical analysis models, leveraging algorithms that are offered via the Apama CEP platform.

A key element in the partnership is the deployment model.  Apama is being hosted in the CQG infrastructure such that their users do not have to install Apama locally in order to access the benefits of the integrated offering.  They can select and parameterize the execution algorithms via Apama dashboards and gain very low latency execution through CQG’s co-located facilities at major global exchanges.

Deals like this signal the growing interest in Apama. Part of the appeal is the flexibility of the underlying Apama CEP platform (and its supporting tools).  That flexibility encompasses different asset classes, the different application use cases that are needed to support those asset classes and, as is evidenced here, different deployment models. 

Shown below is a CQG screen, with the Apama dashboard component highlighted.


Categories: Event Processing

CEP hardware

CEP-Interest - Wed, 2008-11-12 09:53
Vhayu launched Squeezer, a hybrid hardware/software solution, back in June. It includes a hardware card that compresses data, and the company says the
Categories: Event Processing

DEADLINE approaching for AAAI iCEP 2009

CEP-Interest - Wed, 2008-11-12 05:05
[ our apologies should you receive this message more than one time ] AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Event Processing AAAI Spring Symposium Wednesday,
Categories: Event Processing

TIBCO Syndera Operation Suite 3.3.0 released

TIBCO CEP Blog - Wed, 2008-11-12 03:42

Mostly of interest to existing Syndera users: TIBCO has released Syndera 3.3.0, which is now available from the TIBCO download site.

This release mostly consists of a “TIBCOization” of the real-time dashboard rather than new functionality per se. Or, if you prefer, Syndera has been “TIBbed”, “TIBCO’d”, or “TIBCOnified”. That means internal, license and packaging changes only.

More later.

Categories: Event Processing

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

Complex Events News - Tue, 2008-11-11 17:58
By MIGUEL HELFT New York Times What if Google knew before anyone else that a fast-spreading flu outbreak was putting you at heightened risk of getting sick? And what if it could alert you, your doctor and your local public health officials before the muscle aches and chills kicked in?  That, in essence, is the promise [...]
Categories: Event Processing
Syndicate content