TIBCO BusinessEvents 3.0
I was pleased to read the Paul Vincent’s post, TIBCO BusinessEvents 3.0. TIBCO has always had a forward thinking vision for distributed computing and this release of BE 3.0 is another step in the right direction. TIBCO now has the only commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) event processing platform on the market that supports distributed event processing, multi-agent architectures, distributed object caching, extensibility, continuous queries, state management and state-of-the-art rules.
Even thought TIBCO’s BusinessEvents does not yet support Bayesian Classifiers, Artificial Neural Networks and other advanced decision support algorithms, it is just a matter of time before TIBCO will add these advanced features “out of the box”. On the other hand, the extensible nature of TIBCO’s BE makes it possible to add probabalistic computing functionality, however this requires quite a lot of programming and integration work.
When I see a great release like this for TIBCO, it makes me a little nostalgic for “the good old days” travelling the world in the front of the aircraft for TIBCO. TIBCO has a rich and diverse customer base. This customer base includes financial services companies; however, TIBCO is much less dependent on financial services than other event processing companies. So, with TIBCO you not only get great technology, but rock-solid stability in an unstable and uncertain business world.
As a side note, an S&P analyst recently downgraded TIBCO’s stock (TIBX), primarily due to chao in the financial services sector. Because of TIBCO’s global reach and stability, plus forward vision, advanced technologies and many years of commericial success, the S&P downgrade will create a buying opportunity for TIBCO stock.
Filed under: Adapters, Advanced Event Processing, Agents, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Asia Pacific, Blackboard Architecture, Business Activity Monitoring, Business Event Processing, Business Events, Business Optimization, Business Rules, CEP News and Events, Complex Event Processing, Distributed Object Caching, EAI ESB & SOA, EDA, Event Processing, Event Processing Language, Event Processing Modelling, Event Stream Processing, Predictive Business, TIBCO
Even though Tibco BE is the only event processing platform that supports distributed event processing, there’s still a long way to go. I had a interesting discussion about different types of distributed agents and pattern matching with Paul on the tibco blogs. In my mind, the collaborative agent approach that BE uses is not the state of art and dates back to late 90’s.
There are better ways of implementing and supporting distributed agents, which provide greater scalability and should be easier to use than BE’s approach.
Hi Peter,
Great to hear from you.
Sorry, I missed the discussion between Paul and your good self.
Do you mind to sumarize the highlights?
Yours sincerely, Tim
Hi Tim - very insightful summary, although I can’t comment on your predictions…
Hi Peter - I don’t recall discussing agents with you beyond your distributed rete research vs BE’s approach in http://tibcoblogs.com/cep/2008/08/19/cep-vs-bre-a-tibco-ttl-top-ten-list/#comments … If you are interested in agent technologies you may want to also look at TIBCO Hawk (system control agents), or the new Agent standard being developed by Jim Odell at OMG (with our support).
Cheers
Hi Paul,
Thanks for visiting and congrats to the BE team on the progress.
Like you, I am waiting to hear back from Peter before diving into this discussion about distributed agent architectures and approaches.
Yours faithfullly, Tim
thanks for providing the link to the discussion. To clarify, in my mind, distributed agents is a subset of distributed Rete and distributed pattern matching. If you look at the link I provided for DJess in the discussion, it goes into detail on how DJess is used for collaborative agents that are distributed.
Hi Peter - thanks for clarifying your view. AFAIK, “agent technology” is orthogonal to “CEP” and to “rule processing technology”: ie an overlapping set not a subset. Indeed, I’m not aware of any other agent-based commercial rule-engines (and indeed precious few event-driven commercial rule-engines) but there are for sure commercial agent technologies that don’t use rule engines per se.
Here’s a good link fyi:
http://www.jamesodell.com/publications.html
Cheers
Hi Peter,
I tend to agree with Paul on the point that distributed agent based architectures are orthogonal to implementations of distributed rules engines.
Some of my thoughts, A Model For Distributed Event Processing, are here:
http://www.thecepblog.com/2007/11/01/a-model-for-distributed-event-processing/
Admittedly, I need to elaborate further in a post on this topic.
Also, it would be good if Paul and TIBCO could elaborate further on exactly what they mean by an “agent-based commercial rules engine.”
Yours faithfully, Tim
I agree agent technology is orthogonal to CEP.
I was thinking of low level details about how a system implements distributed agents, distributed pattern and distributed RETE. At the high level they should be orthogonal. At the lowest levels, it’s fundamentally about pattern matching and performing those operations efficiently. In some ways agents are also orthogonal to rule engines, since past research has used a variety of techniques including decision trees, simple rule engines, expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic and statistical analysis.
regardless of that, I believe there is still a lot of work left. that applies to Business rule engines, CEP and other rule engines.
Hi Paul,
I noticed that SouthWest airlines commented on BusinessEvents in conjunction with the BE 3.0 release:
“Southwest Airlines, which carries more than 96 million passengers annually, operating more than 3,400 flights a day with more than 34,000 employees, is one example. “With TIBCO BusinessEvents, we’re able to anticipate potential service disruptions involving flight operations that can affect our customer experience,” said Jan Marshall, Southwest Airlines’ vice president of technology and chief information officer. “BusinessEvents helps us maintain our on-time industry leadership and continues to improve operational efficiencies in today’s tough business environment.”
Reference (MarketWatch)
Complex Event Processing Goes Mainstream With TIBCO BusinessEvents 3.
(URL too long, kindly Google for the actual MarketWatch press release).
Yours faithfully, Tim
Thanks Tim -
SouthWest is an interesting BE CEP application with diverse event sources such as the aircraft itself! They, as well as Carphone Warehouse, AllState, and Citi, made presentations at TUCON08 (the TIBCO user group*) and you could view these CEP examples as the TIBCO contributions to CEP usecases this year.
The presentations are available to download from TIBCOmmunity if anyone is interested.
* Alan blogged on TUCON at http://tibcoblogs.com/cep/2008/05/08/cep-and-tucon-where-reality-trumps-all/
Cheers
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