Hub Vandervoort, CTO of Progress Software, presented. The company gets little recognition in the industry because 65% of revenue comes from OEM partners. He talked on the topic of Faster than a Speeding Bullet, which illustrated complex event processing within SOA as velocity within a pipeline. He illustrated the concepts and problems with a series of examples from manufacturing to equity trading.

The obvious issue is how fast or fat is the pipeline. However, most overlook some key side-pipelines. A pipeline requires information provisioning that interacts with complex data with the packets flowing on the pipeline. Another side-pipe is the business visibility that reports on the status of the pipeline's operation. One must alignment (balance) the velocity of the main pipeline with the velocity of these two side-pipes.

Poor alignment causes higher error rates in the business operation. As an example, equity trading was 3-day settling period, which has been reduced to two hours. However, the update cycle on the data warehouse stayed with 24 hours. And, the reporting on those trades also stayed with daily cycles. The margin of safety must be as least 3x, implying that a two-hour latency in a pipeline requires at least a 40-minute latency in both the information provisioning and in the business visibility. Hub asserted that the margin should be 10x to 100x if a company is concerned about compliance.

Why SOA? First, it is the basis for the event-driven pipeline. Second, it supports asynchronous, distributed and federated requirements. Third, it permits the non-invasive insertion of real-time side-pipes with less disruption.

Progress Software is acquiring Iona Technologies to expand its service-oriented architecture product offerings. With its expertise in CORBA object request broker with pub-sub features, Iona has sold Progress products for years to bring smart endpoints together with smart networks.