OMG SOASIG Meeting: Quick Chat with Rhysome's Bob Covington - Event Sensors

During the afternoon caffeine break of the OMG SOASIG meeting, I sat down with Bob Covington, CTO and co-founder of Rhysome, a provider of sense and respond (event-driven) technology.  In our quick conversation, I learned about Rhysome’s founders (former enterprise IT practitioners), how Rhysome’s products evolved, and what (in my view) makes them unique.

Rhysome’s original mission was to create a real-time reporting tool.  However, the team quickly recognized a gap – sensing and delivering relevant real-time information.  This led the team to the broader event-driven space: event detection, collection and processing. 

What’s unique about Rhysome is the focus isn’t solely on event processing.  Rhysome starts at the source – event detection and collection.  See left hand side of illustration copied from Rhysome’s site.

Rhysome describes the “smart cyber-sensors^tm” as follows:

• Detects and collects very small changes in both data and metadata from each information source in an enterprise, in real-time, using a native Event-Driven Architecture.

• Supports a wide range of information sources such as files, database transactions and schemas, logs (device, system application, and transactions), emails (both enterprise and web mail) instant messages (IM), SOAP messages, messages queues, HTTP, and Web content.

• Smart Cyber-Sensors run in the background with negligible or no impact on client or system performance, and no use of invasive database triggers.

• Dynamic filtering techniques remove non-relevant information at the source, significantly reducing implementation requirements and system overhead.

While designed as part of the broader Rhysome solution, the cyber-sensors can (and have) been incorporated in applications that require non-invasive tracking (think security and compliance) without the downstream complex event processing. 

When you start to think of the possibilities, mixing and matching sensors, services, events, business processes, information sources, and user interfaces, things get interesting.  With standards, to ease the interactions, it is even probable. 

For more on Rhysome, see their site.  [Shaded lenses recommended. :)]

[Note: This post was republished (unchanged) on July 13, 2006 at 3:22 due to Typepad system problems]