Posted in News on January 18th, 2007
Brand Events to turn BBC hit into live event
Brand Events has teamed up with television production company Wall to Wall Productions to turn the six-million viewer BBC1 show Who do you think you are? into a live event.
‘Who do you think you are?’, headline sponsored by The Daily Telegraph, will take place at Olympia from 5-7 May. It will feature zones dedicated to many historical interests including military, social, family and restoration, plus a theatre hosting television historians and experts.
Brand Events managing director Chris Hughes says he anticipates 15,000 visitors at the debut event.
Excel to host celebration of Star Wars film
IMIE, the organiser of The British International Motor Show, has won a contract to manage the 30th anniversary celebrations of Star Wars on behalf of Lucasfilm and The Cards Group.
The Star Wars Celebration Europe festival, scheduled for 13-15 July, was originally planned for Earls Court. According to the event’s co-ordinator Barry Eldridge, advanced interest in the festival has been high enough to persuade the organisers to move it to Excel London.
“The larger venue will allow a greater number of guests, larger exhibition space and more outdoor space,” said Eldridge.
Concerto start-up to cover entertainment
The Concerto Group has joined forces with music specialist Vibration Music to launch entertainment agency Full Circle. The start-up will offer entertainment solutions to the corporate party market and will be based in Concerto’s London office.
Concerto chairman Mike Kershaw said: “This is a natural development for our group and further strengthens our integrated offer. Bringing entertainment into our mix of event, catering and production companies helps to widen our product reach.”
The launch follows a number of contract wins for Concerto’s subsidiary companies. The Ultimate Experience has wrestled back
the contract to run parties, awards and conferences at Old Billingsgate in London throughout the 2007 Christmas season.
The agency ran the first Christmas season at Billingsgate in 2004 before losing the account to Mask, which has held the contract during 2005 and 2006.
“We were disappointed when we didn’t win it back in 2005 as it fits so well with our group. It’s a brilliant flagship London venue and it’s where we belong,” said Kershaw.
Mask chief executive Arthur Somerset responded: “We would like to thank our clients for their enthusiasm and trust in our company. With an increase in venue costs it was becoming difficult not to compromise our offer. We wish The Ultimate Experience good luck in the wake of our success.”
Concerto subsidiary Create Food and Party Design has also signed its first exclusive London contract with Plaisterers’ Hall. The caterer has signed a three-year deal that begins this month.
In October last year The Ultimate Experience cancelled events in its new City Central temporary structure near Liverpool Street station, after difficulty acquiring planning and events licensing. All booked events were relocated to alternative venues within its portfolio.
SOA moves toward event handling
What the heck are BEM and CEP? And does the SOA/BPM world need more acronyms?
Like acronyms or not, business event management (BEM) and complex event processing (CEP) are the next step in the fusing of SOA and BPM in business process management suites from major vendors, according to analysts at Forrester Research Inc.
Ken Vollmer, principal analyst at Forrester, had identified these two emerging technologies in a paper titled "Comparing Business Event Management And Complex Event Processing: New Features Add To Overall Business Process Management Suite Capability," which was published in August and may have gotten lost in the summer haze. In that paper he defined what these two new technologies are and why they will be important to the future of SOA projects focused on making business processes more agile.
BEM for humans
BEM is a way to get machines to alert people when a business process is going wrong and needs human attention to get back on track.
"Business event management is the process of capturing real-time business events from multiple sources and assigning them to the appropriate decision-maker for resolution based on the business context of the events," according to Forrester’s definition.
BEM is a cousin to workflow systems, but where the latter focus on human interactions within an organization, BEM focuses on the business processing and business rules and then alerts humans when something goes wrong. The goal is to speed processes up by minimizing time lost because of an exception. As an example, Vollmer points to a system where a credit exception needs to be granted to a customer to complete an order. If a sales manager is alerted, the credit exception for a reliable customer could be granted immediately and the transaction could then be completed. Without the BEM alert, the customer might become frustrated, turn to another supplier and major business might be lost.
While BEM is not yet part of many vendor offerings, Vollmer notes in his report that the technology is making an appearance in some products. "Vitria Technology’s Resolution Accelerator provides BEM capability," he writes, "Lombardi Software’s Undercover Agents provide a similar functionality, as does the event manager component of SAP’s NetWeaver."
CEP emerges
In his report, Vollmer defined CEP as processing software that "automatically correlates events into patterns that may represent a threat or opportunity and orchestrates an appropriate response." As he points out, the concept is not new, having originated in 1998 in a Stanford University research paper authored by David Luckham and Brian Frasca. Their paper titled "Complex Event Processing in Distributed Systems" outlined a message-based system that would gather data on events in a process, use historical data and algorithms to analyze it, and then identify potential problems. The problems might be resolved by applying existing business rules or might be referred to a carbon-based biped for further review and action.
But CEP has been slow coming to market, although Tibco Software Inc., webMethods Inc. and Sun Microsystems, include it in their integration-centric business process management suite (IC-BPMS) product offerings, Vollmer said.
Vollmer notes that there are vendors specializing in CEP, currently led by AptSoft Corp. "They are not an IC-BPMS vendor," he said of AptSoft, "but they do have advanced CEP capability." He anticipates that there will be more of these specialists developing CEP tools to work with products from larger vendors.
AptSoft provides examples of CEP applications already in use by its customers including Georgia-Pacific Corp., which is using AptSoft’s CEP software platform to "to automate a time-consuming, rather intricate process that maintains our supply-chain data," according to Scott Lackey, senior analyst, Georgia-Pacific. He credits CEP with automating formerly manual process including handling anomalies, which goes beyond what can be achieved with traditional business rules engines.
However, despite the promise BEM and CEP to take SOA and BPM technology to the next level, adoption remains slow and Vollmer said he has not seen much progress in adoption in the six months since he wrote his first report.
"There has not been much movement yet among the other IC-BPMS vendors," he said.
Eventia Apponits Agency to Deliver Events Programme
UK trade association Eventia has appointed education and communication consultant Rachel Ley to deliver its 2007 events programme, following an open agency pitch process.
Ley is a former managing director of Meeting Point Conferences (MPC). She left MPC in October 2007 to set up her own company and was one of seven agencies to submit proposals for the contract, which entails the full creation, development, design, production and execution of the association’s event strategy and programme.
John Walker, Head of Eventia’s Education Committee said: “Rachel will be working closely with executive director Izania Downie and our committee on what will be an ambitious programme for 2007. This is a great step forward in providing all of our members, at all levels of seniority, with significant education and networking opportunities.”
The association’s events programme will include seminars, freelancer open days, trade show participation, familiarisation trips, as well as the Summer Eventia and Autumn Workout. A new senior level residential summit and a social party to celebrate National Meetings Week have also been proposed. Plans are already underway for the Summer Eventia 2007, which will take place from July 1-3 at the Hayley Conference Centre, Beaumont House, Old Windsor.
