"Instant Insight is a breakthrough analysis of electronic commerce you keep secret and use to beat rivals" - Grover Ferguson (Chief Scientist, Accenture - Wall Street Journal, Sept 27 2002) .
The enterprise information technology (IT) infrastructure has been called "an event-driven nervous system". Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an emerging technology for coping in realtime with the tasks of managing the IT infrastructures of large electronic enterprises. This includes a spectrum of management tasks such as effective control of eBusiness supply chains, monitoring internet-based enterprise collaborations by means of high level business events, autonomous regulation of eMarketplaces, and Cyber defense of our national IT infrastructures. At present we do none of these tasks well. And effective solutions to any of them present an enormous business opportunity.
All of these management tasks have in common the need to aggregate high level intelligence from the lower layers of the enterprise nervous system. CEP is a technology to track causality between events, and to aggregate complex high level events from sets of lower level events. CEP enables us to understand what activities are taking place in our IT systems. That is, we gain instant insight into how those activities will affect critical functionality of the enterprise. Only then can we take effective action, or succinctly and correctly express automated rules to manage the electronic enterprise.
This seminar will deal with the WHY and WHAT of CEP: why there is a need for new technologies to manage electronic enterprises, and what those technologies must enable us to do. The basic concepts of CEP will be introduced, including basic events and complex events, common relationships between events, event patterns and hierarchies of events.
The HOW of CEP, how to build it, will be deferred to other discussions.
About the speaker:
David Luckham has held faculty and invited faculty positions in mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering at eight major universities in Europe and the United States. He was one of the founders of Rational Software Inc. in 1981, supplying both the company's initial software product and the software team that founded the company. He has been an invited lecturer, keynote speaker, panelist, and USA delegate at many international conferences and congresses. Currently, he is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University. His research and consulting activities in software technology include multi-processing, event-based simulation languages and systems, and Complex Event Processing. He has published four books and over 100 technical papers; two ACM/IEEE Best Paper Awards, several of his papers are now in historical anthologies and book collections. His latest book, "The Power of Events", deals with the foundations of complex event processing in distributed enterprise systems.
Contact information:
David Luckham
Gates 401, Stanford University, CA 94305
650-328-5671
650-323-1422
luckham@stanford.edu