Complex Event Processing (CEP)

Low-latency ESB solution relies on high-powered hardware

Content networking appliance maker Solace Systems pressed the case for its hardware approach to middleware with a recent high-speed message caching update for its Unified Messaging Platform. Think of it as an ESB accelerator! Continued »

Gartner cautions on Oracle middleware status

Oracle Fusion middleware is currently based on a group of product suites for SOA and BPM that are “assemblies of convenience,” argue Gartner analysts.

The suites are made up of Oracle’s existing product line and the technologies from its acquisition of BEA earlier this year, according to a brief report on the state of the current Oracle middleware offering, Oracle OpenWorld’s Middleware Message Is ‘Watch This Space,’ published earlier this month.

The Gartner analysts note that little was said about middleware in the announcements at Oracle Open World last month other than the announced plan to put Fusion in the Amazon cloud. The roadmap announced this past July for the full integration of the BEA products into Oracle’s middleware will not come until sometime in 2009, Gartner predicts.

Rather than judging the future of Oracle middleware by this interim marketing strategy, Gartner analysts recommend waiting for Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g, due in the next six to 12 months.

That release ”will begin to implement the announced road map, and platform modernizations, such as support of OSGi Alliance technology and Service Component Architecture, expanded hot-pluggability, and the extensive use of Oracle Coherence XTP-distributed cache,” the report states.

CEP opportunity in Wall Street bust?

Within every disaster there is the obvious downside, but also an unexpected opportunity. For example, in 1906, my grandfather was an unemployed carpenter in Los Angeles. Then the San Francisco fire and earthquake happened. Seeing an opportunity, he moved up north where his skills were suddenly in great demand.

Fast forward to today and the crisis on Wall Street and the plans in Washington to both rescue and better regulate the financial industry. Complex event processing (CEP) has had a lot of initial success in programs for automated stock trading where price and other events trigger buys and sells. But that was in the boom time and now we are in the bust. Wall Street is doing trades at very low volumes.

So does CEP still have a future on Wall Street?

John Bates, whose research at Cambridge University in the U.K. helped pioneer the event-driven technology, told SOA Talk this week that he sees opportunities for CEP in the new era of financial regulation.

CEP is already being used in banking to detect fraud by scanning transactions for events that indicate nefarious activities, noted Bates, who is now vice president of Apama Products, which develops CEP technology for Progress Software.

CEP can also be used for real-time market surveillance to monitor events that might indicate market manipulation and other forbidden practices, he said.

So if CEP is not already on the radar at the U.S. Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Security and Exchange Commission, it may be soon.

Is BPM Business Re-Engineering in sheep’s clothing?

We note here the untimely passing of Michael Hammer. Hammer coined the term “Re-Engineering,” and started an influential trend to remove unneeded layers of bureaucracy from organizations. The ‘flat’ organization of today owes much to Mike Hammer. Could today’s BPM resurgence take the same course Re-Engineering did? Continued »

XTP powers SOA

Extreme transaction processing (XTP) gets down to business in service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications at AbeBooks.com, a Canada-based online bookstore, profiled in a SearchSOA user story earlier this month. The marketplace for books is using Oracle Coherence, a distributed in-memory data grid designed for XTP environments. A product of Oracle’s purchase of Java performance specialist Tangosol in 2007, Coherence automatically partitions data in-memory across multiple servers.

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