In the week leading up to ebizQ's very exciting first-ever virtual event on Event Processing, I am happy to share with you three articles that have run in the past three sucessive weeks that address topics that will be covered at the conference next week. Sign up now for the keynotes with Roy Schulte and the panels which features the father and godfathers of CEP, which include David Luckham, K. Mani Chandy, and others.

The articles are presented for you here below:

The Engine for Event-Driven SOA
by Jeff Wooten, Aleri
We’re on the verge of a new era for SOA, with the integration of Complex Event Processing technology, which can enable the gathering of data from and about any services running in the enterprise.

Federated Event Systems: The Event Web
by By Dr. K. Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science, California Institute of Technology and Michael Olson, California Institute of Technology
Event-driven applications that are constructed as compositions of Web applications can offer considerable benefits to your enterprise.

2008: The Year of CEP
by By John Morrell, Coral8
Complex event processing software is powering a new generation of applications that enables companies to make faster decisions and execute more effective actions.

Posted by elizabeth in | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since the advent of Web 2.0, there has been a debate in the business community over the real economic benefits of virtual environments. Is Second Life the next main street, or mainly a waste of time? The debate may rage on for the next decade, but for now ebizQ has found that there is real value in virtual environments for one segment of business professionals: conference goers.

ebizQ has launched a new virtual environment for online conferences, which will premier on May 7th with a conference on Event Processing. What are the benefits of a virtual conference environment? Without leaving their desk, attendees can interact with presenters, including Gartner and Forrester analysts, and network with their peers. They can visit virtual booths to chat live with vendors about requirements and solutions And most importantly, business professionals can get their questions answered by industry experts, without taking too much time out of their busy schedules.

Event processing, the subject of the May 7th conference, is an exciting technology being used in conjunction with several technological disciplines such as SOA architecture and process monitoring to increase business agility. Event Processing can improve decision making, reduce costs, and help companies respond quickly to competitive threats and opportunities in the marketplace.

ebizQ's May 7th conference will address burning questions such as: What makes event processing different from conventional application design? What are the different styles of event processing? And how can mainstream companies realize the benefits of event processing?

Registration for ebizQ's Event Processing conference is free to attendees, thanks to sponsors IBM, BEA, IWay Software and Aleri.

For more information, visit http://www.ebizq.net/events/event_processing or visit www.ebizq.net/events/ for a complete schedule of ebizQ's virtual events.

Posted by elizabeth in ebizQ | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Listen to or download the entire 4:30 podcast below:

Download file

I recently had the opportunity to have a short conversation with Keith Bexell of Prudential Financial, after we ran this news about their work. If this kind of industry vertical conversation is interesting to you, I recemmend you join us on Wednesday for this panel discussion, called "Visibility, Control and Evolution: Building on SOA to Meet Today's Financial Services Industry Challenges." Sign up for the free event right here.

Below is the full transcript of this podcast:

Announcer: Welcome to another ebizQ podcast.

EB: Hi, this is Elizabeth Book Kratz and this is another ebizQ podcast. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking of with Keith Bexell, who is Vice President of New Business for the Domestic and Individual Life Insurance Business at Prudential Financial. Thanks for being with me today, Keith.

KB: Thank you, Elizabeth. Glad to be here.

EB: Great. So Prudential Financial just for those who might not know, is a financial services leader with approximately $648 billion of assets under management as of last December. Their primary goal is to help the more than 50 million individual and intuitional customers they have grow and protect their wealth. So again, I appreciate your time today. And basically, I understand from a recent Prudential and Skywire Software News Release that two-way messaging is an industry first, something that you’ve done together and you this is a real-time messaging system that allows agencies to communicate directly with the carrier. Can you give a little background on this and explain what function it serves and why this might be relevant to your clients?

KB: Sure. Elizabeth, in our fast-paced world, we find that prompt and accurate communication between carriers and their broker’s general agency partners is vital to an efficient new business process. The introduction of real-time messaging via Skywire’s Agency Management System, it’ll allow BGA staff to communicate with their carriers without having to leave their primary case management application.

Prudential, like many other carriers, currently, offers real-time messaging from their proprietary website. However, this requires the case management staff at the BGA to jump from one application to another to support their case load. This is inefficient and causes extra work. Putting this functionality into Skywire application, allows them to manage their case communication through a single uniform application, which enhances both the efficiency and quality of the correspondence with carriers.

EB: Wonderful. So here at ebizQ, which in the process of studying, analyzing, and reporting news on enterprise software and middleware, we’ve been definitely delving more into industry verticals like insurance. It appears that Prudential is building a top notch IT system to respond faster to clients and colleagues needs. So it would be wonderful if you could share some general thoughts about how IT is important in the insurance and finance industries, and if you could share your thoughts on the nature of the insurance industry, and industry specific needs to adequately document events, for example, and to have responsive and reliable integrated tools.

KB: Sure. Now, I believe that the shift from proprietary distribution systems to independent third party distributions systems. And it really has increased the life insurance reliance on technology to remain productive and really to enable and support growth. Today, roughly two-thirds of all Life New Business is written through independent distributors versus traditional career agency systems.

The level and sophistication and technology infrastructure across these independent relationships really varies greatly. And as carrier manufacturers being able to make IT investments that support as many of your distributions relationships as possible, with as much flexibility as possible, is really critical to our success. IT platforms that allow us to link document images, data feeds for case status, for example, commissions, and appointments, as well as real-time communication with our new business platform, are the kind of robust and integrated solutions we’re looking to support currently and into the future.

EB: Great. So that kind of gives us a good picture of how you’re doing business at Prudential Financial and we appreciate your time today. Keith Bexell, who is Vice President of New Business for the Domestic and Individual Life Insurance Business at Prudential Financial; thank you for your time today. And this has been an ebizQ podcast.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to a podcast presented by Elizabeth Book Editor in Chief of ebizQ. For comments or questions, please send an e-mail to editor@ebizQ.net or visit Elizabeth’s blog at ebizQ.net/blogs.

[End of Audio]

Posted by elizabeth in | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fantastic piece out today from the incomparable Tony Baer, in which he responds to Steve Mills' comment that SOA is just about blocking and tackling the intricacies of ESB and all, by asking him in an interview if SOA is getting rather boring! Tony is just so un-hype-able that he is an absolutely treasure. Enjoy his most fabulous commentary, here. If Tony didn't already exist, he would have to be invented.

Posted by elizabeth in SOA and Web Services | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I found Bruce Silver's blog entry today on IBM's new simply-branded "BPM Suite," very interesting and compelling, and recommend it to you here in our developing "takeaways" section.

And if you're not already receiving it, you can get ebizQ BPM update, which includes items like this one, by entering your email address and selecting the BPM box, right here.

Posted by elizabeth in BPM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

IBM's Mary Hall gives a rousing roundup of IBM's IMPACT User Conference opening session, which kicked off yesterday in Las Vegas.

The first news item of particular note is the social network being developed by IBM on the topic of SOA.

According to Mary:

"Sandy Carter, IBM's VP of Marketing and Channels described the network as a concept to " brings together a like-minded, global community of thought leaders, information technology (IT) and business professionals, university professors and students, and other interested parties through both online and in-person forums designed to help members build skills and share best practices."

The IBM SOA social network is open to any customers, partners, academics and interested parties aiming to advance and share SOA knowledge and best practices. Membership is free and not restricted to the IBM community.

Mary noted several more interesting items that we will continue to learn about today, including new ventures in industry platforms for innovation (if this interests you, sign up for our panel on SOA in Financial Services, here), and a reloaded BPM Suite with Business Events included. Mary also mentioned the SOA healthchecks that can help your SOA get operationally fit.

I'll check back in later in the day and see what else IBM is up to! And if SOA in industry verticals is of interest to you, sign up immediately for our April 16th panel discussion on SOA in Financial Markets.

Posted by elizabeth in SOA and Web Services | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Listen to or download the entire 7:39 podcast below:

Download file

This podcast is a sneak peak of a live panel discussion that will occur on April 16, called "Visibility, Control and Evolution: Building on SOA to Meet Today's Financial Services Industry Challenges." Sign up for the free event right here.

I asked Hub about how decision makers in the finance space can be convinced to make the move to SOA.

Below is the full transcript of this podcast:

Announcer: Welcome to another ebizQ podcast.

EB: Hi, this is Elizabeth Book (Kratz), and here’s another ebizQ podcast. Today, I am giving you a sneak peek of the SOA in Financial Services Live Panel, which is going to take place April 16th. The title of the panel is called Visibility Control and Evolution: Building on SOA to Meet Today’s Financial Services Industry Challenges. And today, I have with me Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress Software. Thanks for being with me today, Hub.

HV: Hey, thanks for having me.

EB: And basically, a description of the panel that Hub will be on is visible at ebizQ. And he is being joined by Keith Swenson of Fujitsu, Ron Ambuter, CTO of the BPM Workstream Group at JPMorgan Chase, and Ronan Bradley is moderating. He is Principal of Lustratus Research and also an ebizQ associate.

In 2008, IT and financial services is challenged more than ever to support the business as it reacts to rapidly changing market conditions. As over the last few years, the financial services industry has become more complexed and interconnected and IT has focused on integration across business silos and with counterparties, service providers, exchanges, and regulators.

Service oriented architecture promises to meet these challenges but must first be adapted and augmented to reflect the specific requirements of financial services. So that leaves me to my first question with Hub and that is; in the broad context, SOA is well understood, but let’s talk about it specifically for the finance community. How could you potentially convince the finance or other industry vertical type company to change their data delivery methods and spend immense amounts of money on a value proposition like SOA that does provide significant risk?

HV: Yeah, I know, I think it’s a great way of thinking about it because financial services in the context of service oriented architecture does raise some very unique things that may be aren’t apparent in other industries. And so when you look at SOA adoption and SS, I think the principle concerns revolve around really three points. Where are the risks and how can you introduce -- you’re in a risk mitigated way SOA performance, particularly, Web services performance in many areas or at least certain key areas of financial services?

It’s still not at a level it would need to be to kind of meet production objectives today. So how do you deal with SOA and Web services usage in financial services so that it does not compromise those performance objectives? And then, I think, what’s also interesting is the way in which a financial services company can establish measures of success around SOA adoption so that in taking on the risk you also have a way of risk mitigating or least understanding how to, I guess some financial terminology, hedge those risks.

EB: Right. And you did mention this risk is key with financial services. And in addition to risk, they are also unique regulatory requirements associated with financial services companies. Can you discuss how control and visibility is vitally important to these organizations and how products like yours can assist with governance issues?

HV: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there really a couple of different aspects of that. The idea of bringing about visibility in an SOA environment is, obviously, essential to financial services. But SOA really enables you to bring about better visibility because of the loose coupling and greater opportunity to inject probes, if you will, into a SOA application or a SOA environment in order that you can surveil it.

And there’s some really good examples of that both in cross market and, you know, individual organizational kind of environments. So (inaudible), for example, has used our Apama product to surveil their internal operation, a form of business exception management, if you will, to be able to see that not only are their processes running effectively but also to provide full surveillance around compliance.

And that’s one aspect of how it can be done within a single corporate environment. A broader based example of almost the same thing is the way that the FSA, the UK equivalent of the North American or US Security Exchange Commission uses that same basic approach to monitor and surveil all UK markets in real-time to detect and even stop in midstream any kind of fraudulent or irregular trading activity that might be accompanied say with an earnings announcement and so forth or an M&A activity.

So it’s very -- its not as feasible to implement that kind of surveillance and regulatory enforcement in a SOA environment. It’s actually -- SOA enhances the opportunities to do that or provide more opportunities to actually provide for surveillance.

EB: Okay. I do want to hear more about the business events aspect of what you said. And in the context of financial services and BPM, I suspect that events have something to do with process as a whole. How does all that fit together?

HV: Yeah, it does. And so, you know, while we spend more time complementing BPM in most any SOA environment by providing the service orchestration and underlying ESB and data management, data transformation kind of capability in a BPM environment. What’s unique about financial services is that BPM tends to find a more comfortable home in the back office, or mid-office type of operation, and trading institutions, or maybe in the more commercial and retail lending environments, say things like, mortgage application processing.

So those are good environments for BPM. But then when you think about front office environments that are much lower latency, much higher volumes, much more about event driven processes, there you don’t want to use highly orchestrated or model business process; a) because it wouldn’t be performing enough and b) because it needs to be more loosely coupled for scale and for performance reasons.

So to that end, what’s interesting is the perfect complement to BPM in that case, is in business exception or business event management. And by monitoring events, you actually can discover implicit process; model it in a more loosely coupled way, and then use that -- actually leverage the loose coupling of the environment to optimize process much more agilely than you could with strictly codified BPM processes.

It doesn’t say BPM is bad, but in different venues, business exception management becomes a perfect complement to BPM when the (inaudible) drivers are very different

EB: Okay. Fantastic. So this sounds like a pretty good taste of what’s to come, something that we be speaking about a little more on the April 16th panel. Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress Software will be participating in the SOA in Financial Services Live Panel, which is April 16th; Visibility Control and Evolution: Building on SOA to Meet Today’s Financial Services Industry Challenges. Again, that’s April 16th and you can sign up for it at ebizQ.net. We’ll provide a link for it right next to the podcast. And Hub, thanks for being with me today.

HV: My pleasure.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to a podcast presented by Elizabeth Book Editor in Chief of ebizQ. For comments or questions, please send an e-mail to editor@ebizQ.net or visit Elizabeth’s blog at ebizQ.net/blogs.

[End of Audio]

Posted by elizabeth in Podcast | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)