InDetail

InDetail Paper by Bloor Authors Philip Howard Publish date March 2018 Software AG Apama and the Other vendors in this space“ have told us that they are only beginning to see IoT deployments, so the fact that Software AG has more than 300 already, speaks for itself. It is clear to us that the company is a leader in this space and should therefore be on anybody’s shortlist of potential providers.

Philip Howard” Executive summary

here is no doubt that the Key findings Internet of Things is a hot In the opinion of Bloor Research, T topic. For example, according the following represent the key to Oxford Economics “72 percent of features of Software AG Apama and its organisations feel that IoT is critical to their complementary products: competitive advantage”. But deploying • Software AG Apama was the first an IoT solution is not a trivial issue, it product of its type to be introduced involves – and this is a simplistic model and it has been, and remains, a of the processes involved – capturing market leader. It supports both data from sensors, often combining it via individual events (by time and/or gateways and then processing the data spatial characteristics) and time- centrally. However, the sheer volume of windows, and you can also define data generated can be prohibitive if all long-running pattern detection 72 percent of this data is passed across the network, queries. organisations feel“ that so processing is frequently required both Apama has been benchmarked IoT is critical to their at device level and in gateways. This • (by Intel) with a throughput of processing may be simple filtering, but competitive advantage. approximately 70 million records per it will often require more sophisticated second on a single server powered by analytics. In any case it will need to occur the Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family. in real-time, which is where streaming analytics has a central role to play. We • Cumulocity IoT supports more than would go so far as to say that streaming 350 protocols used by a variety ” analytics is fundamental to IoT: you of vendors of sensors, industrial cannot do the latter without the former. devices and gateways. Devices However, streaming analytics may be with embedded , POSIX and necessary, but it is not sufficient. In this Java-compliant devices are also paper we review not only Software AG’s supported. These integrations are streaming analytics platform Apama, but code-free and are managed through also the complementary technologies that a web-based interface. Software AG offers to provide a complete • We like the Industry Analytics Kit. solution. What this does is to provide pre-built solutions to commonly occurring Fast facts issues, encapsulating best practices While this paper focuses on Software that can then be reused. As a simple AG Apama it is not a review of Apama example: what do you do when a per se, but rather of Software AG’s sensor reading is missing? At the approach to IoT Analytics. In that context time of writing there are 35 modules there are a variety of other offerings available, some of which are industry that the company offers that augment (manufacturing or retail) specific and and complement Apama. Under the some of which are generic. There covers, its analytics platform comprises are others in development. There is several components including, but also an Analytics Builder UI so that not limited to, Cumulocity Core for users can create their own reusable managing, integrating and connecting modules. to IoT sensors; Zementis for deploying Zementis is a data science platform predictive models; the Industry Analytics • for building machine learning Kit, which provides pre-built capabilities and predictive models. However, of various types; and MashZone NextGen, Software AG recognises that most which is a visualisation product. In the organisations will already have main body of this paper we will focus preferred products of this type in on Apama, the Industry Analytics Kit and place. The company sees the role MashZone NextGen. We also include a of Zementis – with its support brief discussion of the Cumulocity IoT for PMML (predictive modelling platform. mark-up language) and TensorFlow

3 A Bloor InDetail Paper Models, though not Java models – The bottom line primarily as a tool for supporting the Perhaps the biggest difference between deployment of relevant models rather Software AG’s approach to IoT and than their creation. In this context those of its competitors, is that it aims it is noteworthy that the Zementis to provide a comprehensive solution. Predictive Analytics engine is tightly Most products competitive to Apama integrated with the Apama Correlator. are stand-alone products from pure-play • MashZone NextGen is a business- vendors. Even where rivals have broader oriented analytics product for suites of products they are often a) not querying and visualising data. as complete and b) do not always market It not only supports data from their offerings as a coherent whole. This Apama but also various other puts Software AG in a good place. The The biggest Software AG products including company has obviously thought hard and “difference between TerracottaDB, various ARIS products long about what is required for an IoT Software AG’s and WebMethods. It includes data solution and it has either developed or acquired the necessary technology. There approach to IoT blending capabilities (as does Apama) and is intended as a self-service tool is always a debate about best-of-breed and those of its for business analysts. solutions (which would not rule out competitors, is that Software AG in any case) versus platform- The degree of integration across • based approaches. In the case of IoT it aims to provide different product lines is notable. implementations, which are complex and a comprehensive Other than the products already have many moving parts, we are inclined mentioned, Software AG’s Command solution. to favour the latter, which leaves Software Central (a management and AG very well placed. administrative environment) is also included in this product mix, as is CentraSite (used, amongst other ” things, for governance of predictive models). • Software AG offers a significant number of pre-built applications (accelerators) that are available across a range of horizontal and vertical environments. In the case of IoT these include predictive maintenance, location awareness, track and trace, condition monitoring, and anomaly detection.

© 2018 Bloor 4 Products

his paper focuses on Apama and, The Apama Correlator consists of to a lesser extent, the Industry multiple parallelised containers that are T Analytics Kit and MashZone known as “contexts”. Multiple (thousands) of NextGen. As far as Apama is concerned – contexts may be active simultaneously and currently in version 10.1 – there is both an each context can process any number of Enterprise Edition and a Community Edition. Apama applications, which are written (but The latter is free to download, without see below) in either EPL (event processing registration, from the company’s web site. language) or Java (Apama has a built-in It can be used for prototyping and/or for JVM). The former run significantly faster – small to medium sized deployments. It will approximately 25% – than the latter and run on as little as an ARM v7 processor or there are a variety of pre-built functions a Raspberry Pi, which will make it suitable available through the Industry Analytics Kit for running on edge devices and in IoT (see below). An optimised thread scheduler There are three gateways. Support is via the community allows elastic scaling. front-end“ tools website where there are various video Within the Correlator there are three provided for tutorials that you can watch. major components: the Apama HyperTree, The licensing arrangements for the the Temporal Sequencer and the Stream developers Industry Analytics Kit are discussed below Processor. The first of these is an indexing of Apama but, while most of it is open source the method that indexes fields within an event, applications. analytics are written in EPL (Apama’s event thereby allowing low latency matching These are processing language), so will only be suitable between events and patterns you are trying persona-based for use with Apama. MashZone NextGen, on to detect. It has significant performance the other hand, can theoretically be used advantages compared to landing data into a and intended for as a stand-alone product – we understand database and then querying the data, even use by developers, that one company has used it to replace if that database is running in-memory. The business analysts Tableau – but it is not marketed as such; Temporal Sequencer supports temporal and end users the intention is that it should be the best and spatially-based (for example, within or respectively. product for use with data in motion and near) correlations, while the latter stores and across Software AG’s product line. MashZone organises events that occur within a time NextGen is conventionally licensed. It can interval, and orchestrates real-time analytics run inside a Docker container, if required, across those time windows. For long-running as can Apama, which also supports Cloud queries or where you need to combine real- Foundry. As a general principle products are time and historic event data, events can be ” available both on-premises and in-cloud. stored in the Software AG’s TerracottaDB. This is an in-memory NoSQL database, which is Apama also leveraged by MashZone NextGen. Software AG Apama essentially has three There are three front-end tools provided elements: an integration framework for for developers of Apama applications. connecting to external systems and data These are persona-based and intended feeds, an execution engine known as the for use by developers, business analysts Apama Correlator, and front-end tools for and end users respectively. The first of developers. We will discuss each of these these is an -based environment in turn. that supports development using EPL, the As far as the integration framework is second provides a drag-and-drop interface concerned, Apama ships with connectivity to wherein you graphical model declarative JMS, Universal Messaging, MQTT, Kafka, HTTP, patterns across windows of data, and databases, web services, files on disk and 27 in the third case there is a web-based, capital markets-specific sources. There is also wizard-driven interface whereby you a connectivity plug-in framework that allows parameterise pre-built templates. In this you to create your own in-process adapters context it is worth highlighting the range and to reuse elements of these plug-ins of accelerators offered by Software AG and across other adapters. For example, you can its partners, which offer not just IoT but reuse JSON mapping logic across multiple also the connected customer, intelligent adapters, so you only have to define such GRC (governance, risk and compliance), and processes once. smart logistics, amongst others.

5 A Bloor InDetail Paper Cumulocity IoT platform of platform as a service (PaaS), or on- Cumulocity IoT is an out-of-the-box IoT premises deployment, both at the edge, platform which consists of everything in relevant devices, or in (edge) gateways. from device connectivity and management, If you want to see this in action you can through to integration with enterprise create yourself a user for a demo account at systems and third-party IoT components. www.cumulocity.com. It is delivered complete with analytics Figure 1: components (see below), along with Industry Analytics Kit Software AG Industry integration to Software AG’s business There are a number of commonly occurring Analytics Kits process and portfolio management quality issues that can arise with streaming events, as well as various fundamental analytics that are regularly reused. What Software AG has done, and is doing, with the Industry Analytics Kit is to pre-build these components for you, which run inside Apama. However, it has not stopped there but has also developed extended capabilities that, for example, link different capabilities together. For example, linking a threshold breach to a missing data analytic that will look for any gaps in regular breaches. The company has also developed a number of industry specific capabilities, as can be seen in Figure 1. As opposed to the generic capabilities, which are mostly open source (but which only work with Apama) and free to use, the industry specific analytics are proprietary. There is also an Analytics Builder UI available on Software AG’s community website. In due course, we expect that you will be able to share analytics that you have developed, via this web site.

MashZone NextGen MashZone NextGen is a self-service analytics environment for preparing and analysing data. In terms of data preparation, the product’s data profiling capabilities are relatively limited (some basic functions) at present, but there are plans to significantly extend the product in this area. On the other hand, it can blend data both when it is in motion and when it is at rest. As indeed, can Apama. It is frequently used to build Figure 2 – real-time dashboards as per the example Energy Grid dashboard built products. There is very tight integration in Figure 2, which is monitoring an energy using MashZone NextGen with Apama and this can run as a service grid. Data sources it works with include any within the Cumulocity IoT platform. database that can be accessed via JDBC Although the IoT platform is built on (as well as other JDBC compliant sources the Software AG technology stack, the such as Salesforce.com), CSV files, XML files, components thereof are completely hidden JSON files (over REST), TerracottaDB, ARIS from the user, unless they want to delve tables, WebMethods and Apama. In the case under the covers. It comes with its own of Apama, integration is bi-directional, in solution accelerators for specific industries order to support actionable analytics. In this and can be hosted using any combination context it is worth distinguishing between

© 2018 Bloor 6 the capabilities built into Apama and those want to be able to deploy (real-time) in MashZone NextGen. They can both be analytics at any stage in this process, from used to build (interactive) dashboards but the device through to what is described in the case of Apama that is an Apama here as the “global platform”. dashboard while with MashZone NextGen The way that Cumulocity and Apama these dashboards extend far beyond Apama integrate, and the options that are and, indeed, might be used for environments available, should be self-evident from where Apama is not in place. Figure 4, but it is worth commenting that Figure 3: MashZone NextGen integrates with Apama requires just 32Mb of memory and, Predictive Analytics architecture at a Command Central, as does Apama. Queries on an ARM device, 76Mb of disk space. So large German chemicals company are created using RAQL (real-time query language) which is a SQL variant designed to support streaming data sets.

Putting it all together While Apama may be used, and is, as a stand-alone product (possibly in conjunction with the Industry Analytics Kit) it is when all three of these offerings are put together with other Software AG products that things really start to get interesting. For example, consider Figure 3. This is the overview architecture at one of Software AG’s customers: a large German chemical company. Data science teams create predictive models, using their tool of choice (Knime, for example) in PMML format. This is actually one of the few areas where we think Software AG falls short. Java models are becoming increasingly popular and we would like to see Zementis supporting these in addition to PMML. Once created, WebMethods is then used to copy models into the run-time environment, with Software AG’s CentraSite being used for model governance. Once copied, Apama can dynamically deploy and use these models with a single runtime managing pre-processing (which ensures that Apama has all the data points in needs), dynamic updating and execution of the models, and their post-processing to make the data ready for visualisation, which is brought together in MashZone NextGen. Figure 4: This is not a specifically IoT Apama and Cumulocity architecture. It is an illustration of it is well-suited to implementations even in the context of IoT predictive analytics, which might apply down to the device level. to fraud detection as much as it does What we should really like to do to predictive maintenance or, indeed, is to combine Figures 3 and 4 because other use cases. Figure 4, on the other Software AG’s IoT story really comprises hand, focuses on the use of Apama and both. Unfortunately, such a diagram Cumulocity within the context of IoT. would be too complex. However, it would We refer to this sort of architecture as illustrate the real story: being able to “concentric analytics” though only part deploy anywhere, analyse in real-time, of the relevant circles are shown in this and visualise the results. That is a diagram. However, the point is that you powerful combination.

7 A Bloor InDetail Paper The company

oftware AG, founded in 1969, Software AG’s Apama was originally is headquartered in Darmstadt, developed – almost two decades ago, it S Germany and has offices was first released in 2001 – as a complex worldwide. While originally making event processing platform targeted at its name with the Adabas database, supporting algorithmic trading in capital and subsequently with the Natural markets. It remains a market leader in 4GL, Software AG started to focus on that space. It was acquired by Progress service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Software in 2005 before being sold to infrastructure when that first became Software AG in 2013. popular and it bought or built several As far as the IoT space is concerned, complementary technologies, including Software AG has more than 300 clients the acquisition of both WebMethods across manufacturing, retail, healthcare Software AG’s and ARIS, and the development of and transport, amongst others. Users “Apama was CentraSite (in conjunction with Fujitsu). include Bosch, Siemens, and Deutsche originally developed More recently, the company has acquired Telekom. Apama (2013), Zementis (2016) and as a complex Cumulocity (2017). Website: www.softwareag.com event processing platform targeted at supporting algorithmic trading in capital markets. It remains a market leader in that space. ”

© 2018 Bloor 8 Conclusion

hether from an IoT perspective As a summary, we think this is an or a streaming analytics point impressive product set. Other vendors in W of view, it is difficult to think this space have told us that they are only of anything that you might require that beginning to see IoT deployments, so the is not provided within Software AG’s fact that Software AG has more than 300 portfolio of products. This is especially already, speaks for itself. It is clear to us important in these environments. Using that the company is a leader in this space open source technologies – a popular and should therefore be on anybody’s alternative approach – could mean shortlist of potential providers. stitching together half a dozen different products, or more, with all the complexity and cost that that involves. Moreover, the Industry Analytics Kit and the company’s It is difficult to accelerators mean that you can get think of anything“ started with an Apama-based project that you might very much more quickly than you might otherwise expect. require that is not provided within Software AG’s portfolio of products. FURTHER INFORMATION Further information about this subject is available from www.BloorResearch.com/update/2444 ”

9 A Bloor InDetail Paper About the author PHILIP HOWARD Research Director / Information Management

hilip started in the computer databases and data warehousing, data industry way back in 1973 integration, data quality, master data P and has variously worked as management, data governance, data a systems analyst, programmer and migration, metadata management, and salesperson, as well as in marketing and data preparation and analytics. product management, for a variety of In addition to the numerous reports companies including GEC Marconi, GPT, Philip has written on behalf of Bloor Philips Data Systems, Raytheon and NCR. Research, Philip also contributes regularly After a quarter of a century of not to IT-Director.com and IT-Analysis.com and being his own boss Philip set up his own was previously editor of both Application company in 1992 and his first client was Development News and Operating Bloor Research (then ButlerBloor), with System News on behalf of Cambridge Philip working for the company as an Market Intelligence (CMI). He has also associate analyst. His relationship with contributed to various magazines and Bloor Research has continued since that written a number of reports published by time and he is now Research Director, companies such as CMI and The Financial focused on Information Management. Times. Philip speaks regularly at Information management includes conferences and other events throughout anything that refers to the management, Europe and North America. movement, governance and storage of Away from work, Philip’s primary data, as well as access to and analysis of leisure activities are canal boats, skiing, that data. It involves diverse technologies playing Bridge (at which he is a Life that include (but are not limited to) Master), and dining out.

© 2018 Bloor 10 Bloor overview Technology is enabling rapid business evolution. The opportunities are immense but if you do not adapt then you will not survive. So in the age of Mutable business Evolution is Essential to your success. We’ll show you the future and help you deliver it. Bloor brings fresh technological thinking to help you navigate complex business situations, converting challenges into new opportunities for real growth, profitability and impact. We provide actionable strategic insight through our innovative independent technology research, advisory and consulting services. We assist companies throughout their transformation journeys to stay relevant, bringing fresh thinking to complex business situations and turning challenges into new opportunities for real growth and profitability. For over 25 years, Bloor has assisted companies to intelligently evolve: by embracing technology to adjust their strategies and achieve the best possible outcomes. At Bloor, we will help you challenge assumptions to consistently improve and succeed.

Copyright and disclaimer This document is copyright © 2018 Bloor. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any method whatsoever without the prior consent of Bloor Research. Due to the nature of this material, numerous hardware and software products have been mentioned by name. In the majority, if not all, of the cases, these product names are claimed as trademarks by the companies that manufacture the products. It is not Bloor Research’s intent to claim these names or trademarks as our own. Likewise, company logos, graphics or screen shots have been reproduced with the consent of the owner and are subject to that owner’s copyright. Whilst every care has been taken in the preparation of this document to ensure that the information is correct, the publishers cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions.

11 A Bloor InDetail Paper Bloor Research International Ltd 20–22 Wenlock Road LONDON N1 7GU United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)20 7043 9750 Web: www.Bloor.eu email: [email protected]