How Big Will Complex Event Processing Get?

SOA in Action Blog

« Can We Truly Measure Business Systems 'Agility'? | Main | The State of the SOA Union: Sound, but Needing More Business Focus »

January 25, 2008

How Big Will Complex Event Processing Get?

How big will complex event processing (CEP) get?

Long seen as a technical backwater, some industry observers say CEP is going to be huge, that it's the next big thing at the intersection of SOA, business process management, and data management. In a new post, Don DeLoach, president and CEO of Aleri, said that "we are on the dawn of this explosion, and I feel it is surely coming."

What's driving the market? DeLoach thinks "the CEP market is going to be huge because it is being driven by a few unmistakable elements and irreversible trends. The volume of data that organizations need to deal with is growing and the time frames in which they need to act are shrinking. CEP is specifically designed to absorb large amounts of data in real-time and analyze that data on the fly."

DeLoach compares the current era of CEP to relational databases and client/server in the 1980s, when the mainstream market wasn't taking these approaches seriously.

Use-cases which cry out for CEP include market data absorption and enrichment, algorithmic trading, smart order routing, market making and pricing engines, market liquidity discovery, market surveillance, transaction cost analysis, regulatory and compliance requirements, and especially real-time risk management -- any situation where decision-makers need to know when things are happening on a real-time basis.

Indeed, complex event processing (CEP) has been getting a lot of attention as of late, and is seen as the next stage of evolution for SOA projects. Now it has the big vendors -- including IBM -- promoting it.

IBM WebSphere CTO Jerry Cuomo recently said that he sees the SOA-EDA-CEP marriage as one of the most pronounced trends to watch in 2008. As Cuomo explained in an interview: “I really believe [event processing is] the next big thing in SOA…. we’re taking it very seriously.”

IBM even wants to take the technical allusions out of the term itself, referring to it as "Business Event Processing." The renaming to BEP makes sense, since I doubt if a concept that starts with the word "complex" is going to win a lot of converts.

Last week, Big Blue put its money where its mouth is, announcing it would be buying AptSoft, a CEP tools and platform vendor. Sandy Carter, senior vice president of IBM's WebSphere division, said that what they call "business event processing" should be at the disposal of, well, the business. "Everybody is talking about complex event processing. We are trying to rename that category, because we believe the real value is in Business Event Processing, the focus on the business. We believe we are elevating for customers something that was a deep technology capability, something that only engineers understand."

With its purchase of AptSoft and plans to include CEP (er, BEP) functionality into its WebSphere platform, IBM obviously sees a robust market opportunity emerging. Carter said IBM already has invested a billion dollars in the events processing space, not counting its AptSoft purchase.

Posted by joemckendrick in Business Process Management • Data Management • SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us