Complex event processing: still on the launch pad

Complex event processing has a sleek, shiny, space-age allure. CEP has been blinking on the IT industry’s “next big thing” radar for quite a while, promising business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams.

Event-driven application architectures are becoming more important for modern business, as the volume of time-sensitive, real-time data that enterprise and carrier networks must process, store and manage continues to expand.

However, CEP has yet to launch into the stratosphere of mainstream enterprise applications. For sure, the technology — also known as “event processing” or “event stream processing” — has found its niche with operational applications such as business activity monitoring (BAM), distributed process control, sensor networks, financial transaction surveillance and integrated logistics management.

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Complex event processing has a sleek, shiny, space-age allure. CEP has been blinking on the IT industry’s “next big thing” radar for quite a while, promising business agility through continuous correlation and visualization of multiple event-streams.

Event-driven application architectures are becoming more important for modern business, as the volume of time-sensitive, real-time data that enterprise and carrier networks must process, store and manage continues to expand.

However, CEP has yet to launch into the stratosphere of mainstream enterprise applications. For sure, the technology — also known as “event processing” or “event stream processing” — has found its niche with operational applications such as business activity monitoring (BAM), distributed process control, sensor networks, financial transaction surveillance and integrated logistics management.

But rare is the CEP application that supports the everyday needs of the average knowledge worker. CEP is still predominantly deployed as a stovepipe for specialized, albeit mission-critical, applications. And it is still primarily a vertical, industry-focused IT market segment, which is especially strong in finance, telecommunications, transportation, manufacturing and the military.

None of which is to imply that the CEP market is not buzzing with activity or growing apace. The past several years have seen the entry of many promising, pure-play CEP vendors, including Agent Logic, Aleri, AptSoft, Coral8, Esper, GemStone, Kaskad, LeanWay, RiverGlass, SeeWhy, Syndera, StreamBase and Vhayu.

In recent months, Aleri, Coral8, SeeWhy and StreamBase have issued important product enhancements that keep them in the forefront of industry innovation. In addition, established SOA; business process management (BPM); and middleware vendors such as TIBCO, Progress Software, BEA and IBM have continued to beef up their CEP offerings through strategic acquisitions and product development.

But what’s conspicuously missing is any serious CEP uptake by business intelligence (BI) vendors, who could be instrumental in delivering real-time event streams to desktops, mobile devices, and other client environments. Consequently, most CEP tools must be implemented alongside users’ existing BI environments, providing a separate, event-optimized layer of visualization, dashboarding, modeling, repository, rules engine, resource connection and administration tools.

What could explain this reluctance by BI vendors to test the CEP waters? To some degree, their wait-and-see posture reflects the slow uptake of real-time BI among their core enterprise customers. BI vendors have been beating the real-time drum for some time now. However, few BI users have been clamoring for the ability to refresh reports, dashboards and scorecards continuously with straight-from-the-source event feeds.

Many BI users can tolerate some latency in the delivery of key business data, and have been quite content to pull such data from intermediary data warehouses, which combine near-real-time data with historical information.