Progress Software has become one of the founding members of a new industry consortium, the Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) which will drive the adoption and effective use of event processing in a wide range of applications across all industries.
Other members of the EPTS include Coral8, Gartner Research, IBM, Oracle, StreamBase and TIBCO Software.
Dr David Luckham, a pioneer in this field, says: "We've had decades of development of event processing technology for simulation systems, networking and operations management. Now, the explosion in the amount of business event data being generated in modern enterprises demands a new event processing technology foundation for business intelligence and enterprise management applications."
"Almost every company has operational or other continuously running activities that require rapid, informed responses to changing conditions," says Roy Schulte, VP and analyst at Gartner Research. "Examples include factory floors, customer contact centres, retail stores and bank branches, casino gaming rooms, websites, bank ATM systems, communication networks and transportation operations. A typical large company deals with 100 000 to one million business events per second."
Specifically, the EPTS has five initial goals:
* Document usage scenarios where event processing brings business benefits;
* Develop a common event processing glossary for its members and the community at large to use when dealing with event processing;
* Accelerate the development and dissemination of best practices for event processing;
* Encourage academic research, help in establishment of event processing as a research discipline, and help in collaboration between the research community and the industry, by encouraging the funding of such applied research; and
* Work with existing standards development organizations such as OMG, OASIS and W3C to disseminate and where necessary incubate a set of consistent; standards in the areas of: event formats, event processing interoperability, event processing (meta) modelling and (meta) languages; EPTS does not plan to develop standards itself.
"Event processing has already gained noticeable traction, but there is much growth remaining, and with that growth comes challenges. In EPTS, we bring together the leading minds among vendors, researchers, analysts, integrators and customers, to collaborate to address the challenges," says Dr Opher Etzion, chair of the EPTS steering committee.
"I am fully confident that the activities of EPTS will generate a continuous flow of results, which will help in gaining increasing business value from the use of event processing technologies."
Among the initial deliverables of the EPTS is a common glossary describing key industry terms. An initial draft of the proposed glossary is already under way. In support of the usage scenarios, a use case workgroup is generating templates around documentation and presentation of the use cases, and will apply it to a variety of real world case studies. In parallel to developing the scenarios, a team will be pulled together to study and formulate recommendation and best practices around event processing application design, implementation and its usage.
"We have had the unique experience of witnessing event processing evolve from an academic concept to a powerful, mature tool that is helping Fortune 500 companies make smarter, more profitable business decisions," says Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa. Progress owns and markets Apama, the market's leading event processing solution.
"We have been involved in event processing from the conceptual phase and it is incredibly gratifying to see the success we've had in developing it into a market-leading solution. The EPTS will help industry pioneers to translate the benefits of event processing and accelerate its uptake, which is our ultimate goal." In addition, the EPTS is forming three additional workgroups:
1. The first group will focus on developing information on event processing architecture and functionality using the use case analysis work;
2. The second group will identify requirements for interoperability among event processing applications and platforms; and
3. The third group will collaborate with the academic community to help establish academic courses in this area.
* All EPTS materials can viewed at http://www.ep-ts.com/. Organisations or individuals interested in joining the EPTS can send an e-mail to mailto:info@ep-ts.com.
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Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: RGS) provides application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Its goal is to maximise the benefits of IT while minimising its complexity and total cost of ownership. Progress can be reached at http://www.progress.com/.
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