Distributed Event Processing

Went to a good talk at the BCS SPA last week by Paul Vincent of TIBCO entitled "Advanced CEP and EDA - Why the buzz on Wall Street?"

• BCS SPA website
• Paul's summary
• Paul's slides (pdf)

I was particularly interested in Paul's emphasis on the distributed aspects of event processing.

• Distributed event source - "A series of produced items fails at various QA stages, and their common attribute was a storage location - Multiple suppliers for a subcomponent are reporting delivery delays"

• Distributed event cache - This is a key component of TIBCO's advanced CEP architecture

• Distributed event consumption (destination) - Delivering rich situation awareness to field operations. This is related to the military doctrine of "Power to the Edge".

At my prompting, Paul talked briefly and circumspectly about the use of CEP in the military. He averred that at present the military are mostly using hand-built event processing rather than commercial products (but see later comment by Tim Bass).