Tibco launches complex event processing application

19.04.2005
Von Ephraim Schwartz

Tibco Software unveiled this week Tibco BusinessEvents, software that adds the notion of complex event processing to traditional business process management software.

Historically, if a company wanted the state of a particular transaction visible, it had to write instructions into the database and then send it to a data warehouse, according to Dan Sholler, vice president of research at Gartner. Although monitoring certain processes has always had value, Sholler said, prior to Tibco"s operational event processing solution, mainstream technology was not able to make the state of a transaction visible in real time.

"The event model gives you a way of looking at these things with less latency and it allows you to define the information you want to publish at a higher level," Sholler said.

In its simplest form, BusinessEvents will allow managers to understand how seemingly unrelated events have an impact at a higher level.

"BusinessEvents will tell you how a router impacts a network that impacts the applications that impacts the business processes," said Scott Fingerhut, general manager, business optimization at Tibco.

At a more complex level, a company might run a sales promotion and track its progress by monitoring and publishing data from the order management system every hour. The order management system might also publish the total sales transactions, which in turn might kick off a calculation to determine from total sales how many sales were created due to the promotion.

However, Sholler warned that this presumes that all the sales promotion processes have been modeled and modeling is still a manual process. Once the models are created, however, BusinessEvents takes over.

"You have to get all the information out of core system and run calculations and do all the mechanics and the Tibco system has the capabilities to do all of that," Sholler indicated.

Tibco BusinessEvents is available now. Pricing starts at US$100,000 and varies according to implementation requirements and project scope.