I thought it would be a good time to update the CEP Market diagram. This covers all the main event processing application development tools (as far as I know). Compared to, say, the EPTS membership list there will be a mismatch - some EPTS members have not announced products yet, are in conventional (as in, not continuous / complex) event processing, or are focused on research.

I also thought it might be a good idea to bend the original rule for inclusion to add some of the fruits of the main players in CEP such as Dr Luckham’s Stanford spin-off ePatterns, as mentioned in his “Short History of CEP”.

It’s quite likely we’ll see more CEP merger and acquisition activity in 2010. Meanwhile it is the BPMS market that is currently in the news with a spate of takeovers (i.e. IBM with Lombardi, and Progress with Savvion). BPM is of course related to (and indeed a type of) event processing, albeit with a focus on standard operating procedures and processes  (exemplified by the “human-oriented simple event processing” that is workflow); but then, BPM is also considered a much larger market than CEP - at least in the first decade of the the 21st centory.

TIBCO’s contributions to event processing innovations in 2010 start appearing in merely a few weeks - it should be a good year!

Notes:

Start dates for tools and tool classification are not guaranteed:

• Start date is based on “available data” for “commercial delivery” (hence excluding lab-only “products”)
  
• Font size is meant to give a very approximate indication of number of (CEP tool) customers and thence indication of market importance. Yes, VERY approximate!

Yet Another Analyst report means that Forrester has joined Gartner, IDC, and Bloor (and possibly a few others) with coverage of, and comparisons between, CEP vendors.

The Forrester CEP Wave for Q3 2009 was done by Mike Gualtieri and John Rymer who, whilst perhaps being new to the field of CEP, have previously covered the BRE and BRMS market [*1] for Forrester. Although many people realise there is both an affinity and synergy between event processing and business rules, one suspects the authors are keeping such thoughts to themselves in describing CEP as a “hot new enterprise middleware category” (per Mike’s blog). Presumably they use this description because CEP systems can be event sources as well as sinks - but on the other hand so can many other types of system, so overall “middleware” probably isn’t the best description one could use.

Interestingly this report does not use or refer to Forrester’s previous classification of event processing systems.

The good news for CEP users is that there are clearly no “weak” offerings in the CEP market!

I always thought Rolando Hernandez had an excellent idea with his “BRE Family Tree” - and had at some point tried to persuade Prof Luckham to do something similar for the “CEP market”. I was reminded of this by Opher’s blog on CEP and EDA in the current Gartner “hype cycle”, and as I had recently drafted such a CEP version for an internal presentation I decided to post it up here. The chart purports to show the “main players” in CEP today. Probably I’m missing some startups, or R&D offerings that have been commercially sold, and the start dates for such “commercial offerings” may be open to debate. But it shows the main players, at least. And it will be interesting to see how this evolves over the next year or so!

Dr John Bates of Apama, cofounder of one of the earliest vendors in the CEP space, gave a very nice keynote presentation at DEBS. Apama’s view on CEP market trends include things like location-aware telco services such as real-time dating (!), transport and logistics, etc. In particular John predicted:

• the rise of event-driven business rules, tracking anything on the planet
• federated services and the agile “enterprise nervous system”, including event rules in the cloud(s), in IT Architecture
• the demise of the specialist “EP”/”CEP” market with its replacement by “Event Driven BPM” covering rules, events and BPM as well as industry apps embedding event processing.

One automatically respects speakers when they politely reference their industry competitors - for example John gave due credit to TIBCO for pushing event processing in market areas beyond Capital Markets, as well as rule-engine-based event processing. And there was nothing in John’s presentation we could disagree (much) with. Except maybe the need for that CEP-driven dating thing…

[Disclaimer: Apama is a competitor to TIBCO BusinessEvents in the CEP market].

Recently I decided to change from my tried-and-tested 3-blade razor to a new-fangled razor with n>3 blades. Initially I resisted the change, as (1) the original 3-bladed solution seemed to work fine and (2) I hate the thought of being led, or duped, into change. However, the availability of the 3-bladed cartridges seemed to be in decline, indicating a “market trend”, so I resigned myself to the hype only to be surprised to find the 5 (or is it 6?) bladed version indeed to be very nice to use. The trusty 3-blader was assigned to the travel washbag.

A funny thing happened when I next travelled: the 3-blader felt totally unsatisfactory. Either the use of the n>3 blades had somehow and deviously changed my skin, or I had automatically accepted the advantages of the 5-blader making it a new minimum benchmark for the task in hand.

The same seems to be true of the CEP market. How many projects or companies adopting event-based approaches are reverting back to conventional data-driven or app-server approaches? At TIBCO I had known of only 1 early TIBCO BusinessEvents adopter who had reportedly stopped using the technology (and even then, when I met this company last week, I found that the report was wrong - they were still using BE). So who has reverted “back”, and why? Like the n+1 bladed razor, CEP is more than hype it seems…