Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri presented on his view of the Complex Event Processing space versus the BRE space - Mike is co-author of both the BRE and CEP Forrester reports. So, going into this, the audience were wondering: is Mike going to say “keep them separate - they are tackling different problems”? Or “they are doing much the same thing - combine them”?

Mike gave a simplistic version of the differences between BREs and CEP engines: CEP handling multiple event channels for input and output, and using (mostly) different algorithms. Mike used the term “event handlers” for the equivalent to BRE rulesets (roughly equivalent to EPTS‘ Event Processing Elements). as well as the term “temporal cache” for CEP event stores. He also coined the term “Event Processing Architecture” to describe CEP-based architectures and event processing networks. Although I quite like some of this terminology, Mike was called out by the audience for his use of some terms - for example comparing CEP with “Business Rules” (when he meant “Business Rule Engines”, and would have been even more accurate if he just said data-driven rule engines…). He was also called out by the audience when he claimed no BREs had temporal constructs for the example he showed (which was recognisable as an example from a mostly-financial-services CEP vendor)  - when a few do…

Also mentioned were 2 examples of where CEP and BRE technology are already being combined - including TIBCO BusinessEvents (described as “poaching from the BRE market”, although I prefer to think the customer base is just becoming better educated… ), and the open source Drools offering (described as a BRE introducing some CEP features).

Mike ended with his comment that real-time / temporal business rules / decisions should all be processed on a single platform, not on separate CEP and BRE platforms. Which of course is what TIBCO does today - so kudos to Mike for calling this out at a BRE conference.

As a side note I see the parallel session by Gartner’s Jim Sinur (on BRManagement as a partner to Process) also mentioned how “rules technology was being included in CEP”…

… asks analyst Mike Gualtieri (co-author of the recent Forrester CEP Wave) in a recent twitter. Luckily for Mike he doesn’t have to look too far to find an answer (as presumably this is covered in his own CEP Wave report)… TIBCO BusinessEvents provides exactly that!

PS: just *how* exactly do people find time to twitter?

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!

Forrester’s James Kobelius made some interesting comments on the proposed buy-out of IDS Scheer - known for their high level process modeling tool Aris - by SoftwareAG. Such as:

“What’s most exciting, and potentially differentiating, about the Software AG/IDS Scheer BI portfolio is the combination of CEP with mashup and an in-memory architecture to support truly real-time, interactive analytics. In other words, Software AG/IDS Scheer could take a page out of the book of another SOA full-stack vendor: TIBCO and its Spotfire product group. “

Unfortunately the IDS Scheer BAM solution (which does not claim to be a Complex Event Processing solution) is OEMed - making full integration and exploitation more difficult. Otherwise, we agree, this could have had some potential to catch up with TIBCO.

Possibly more interesting to the event processing community is IDS’ alternative to value chain models - their event-driven process chain. Mostly this has been replaced by BPMN diagramming in modern process modeling environments, but nonetheless could still provide a useful high-level notation… perhaps SoftwareAG will propose it as a standard somewhere?