David Luckham Is the Keynote Speaker at Pen,” He Says

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PERSPECTIVE INFLUENCER Man of events

or the first year after David vision. As they do so, they will undoubt- Luckham’s book, The Power of Events, edly turn to Luckham’s book for a was published in 2002, it did what grounding in the design principles. F Power of Events most technical books do: disappeared The is based on years of into the academic ether. The publishers, research work at Stanford and two years he says, didn’t promote it at all, and its as CTO of a software start-up working in technical nature put it beyond the reach the field. The book is a technical mani- of most readers. festo for CEP – the ability of systems to As a result, it looked like the ‘event- recognise and respond to complex, inter- driven revolution’, of which the Stanford related events in real time. University Emeritus Professor is the lead- Luckham has spent 22 years as a ing and most passionate advocate, would Professor of Electrical Engineering at be postponed for a few years more. Stanford, and many years before that Stanford University But then, in mid-2003, two important doing ground-breaking work at Emeritus Professor David US technical journals gave the book Harvard, Stanford, UCLA and MIT. But highly positive reviews, and interest his presentations, and the first half of Luckham has spent began to grow. Sales began to rise, at first his book, at least, are in plain English, decades studying event slowly, then dramatically. Luckham star- full of clear examples of why CEP will processing. Now the ted to see one or two people reading it soon be so important. on airplanes, software companies started Luckham’s interest in this field goes importance of his work to order 30 or 40 copies at a time, and back a long way. During the 1970s, he is being recognised. analysts began to cite his work. “It’s not a was funded by the Defense Advanced bestseller like JK Rowling,” he says, “But Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a it seems to have become a cult book.” lead developer for the robust, object-ori- activity monitoring (BAM) – can so far As a result, Luckham, who has been ented programming language Ada. Not really be described as a form of CEP. both a distinguished academic and a only did this enable him to develop com- Luckham sees BAM as a beginning of software entrepreneur in his long career, piler technology with which he commercial CEP development with has suddenly found himself the centre of co-founded Rational Software, but he more sophisticated uses of CEP to come attention, enabling him to embark on a first began to design defence systems further down the line. new career. Speaking and consulting that could react quickly to events. From its deeply technical background, invitations have poured in, and he has This eventually led, many years later, to EDA and CEP is about to hit the corpo- found himself now advising both estab- the creation of Rapide – a high-level rate mainstream. Luckham, in lished and start-up software companies modelling toolset for building systems conjunction with Roy Schulte, the on what they must do to ensure that that can recognise complex patterns of Gartner Group analyst who coined the their products are able to exploit or events. Although this was originally term EDA, have slashed the time they drive the emerging world of Complex developed for simulating integrated cir- think it will take for a radical new event- Event Processing (CEP). cuits, one of Luckham’s conceptual leaps driven architecture to take hold in the This is important for them and for was to apply it to distributed enterprise business world at large. “At first, progress their customers, Luckham believes. CEP is systems. A perfect platform, for example, was slower than we expected. Then it was technically complex if done properly was Tibco’s publish-and-subscribe inte- faster. Now we think it will it take six to (which it sometimes isn’t), but Luckham gration bus. eight years.” And their advice is to start argues it will deliver huge business bene- Luckham stresses that CEP is not planning for it now. fits across all kinds of industries. “This is exactly the same as EDA – the Gartner the next step in software. It has to hap- term that describes an underlying infra- • David Luckham is the keynote speaker at pen,” he says. structure that has the capability to Information Age’s XML and Web Services Luckham is not alone in this belief. At distribute and manage event information. conference in London on 29 & 30 September recent conferences, the Gartner Group CEP concentrates on ordering and mak- 2004. To register for a free place, visit has described its slant on CEP – the ing use of complex patterns and www.xmlwebservices.co.uk. Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) – as hierarchies of event information once it “the next big thing” in software, and has becomes available. advised its clients to start preparing for it Already, dozens of software compa- CONTACT now. It warns that a huge wave of hype nies are working in the field. But Article by Andrew Lawrence around EDA is about to break as suppliers Gartner stresses that only one general [email protected] rush to embrace the technology and the business application area – business