According to Streambase, a small Boston area software company, the next big thing is complex event processing (CEP). Streambase says CEP, which was also the hot buzzword of 2005, is making a comeback at the 2010 Davos Economic Conference. CEP is the information-technology (IT) concept of the year in the snowy Alps, or some such designation. How that honor is decided is unclear but the marketing snow around Steambase smells like the run up to an IPO to me.
And if I am reading its web site correctly I think Streambase's promotion of the CEP concept begins by pointing out that CEP might be the basis for the next financial-markets meltdown (and might have had something to do with the last one). According to Streambase, CEP was also involved in the failure to catch the Christmas Day underwear bomber.
All of this is from the "say anything you want about me but spell my name right" school of PR.
In the first situation, Streambase promotes CEP's usage in "retail contracts for difference," for "one of the largest financial spread betting leaders." At least Streambase is honest in describing its client as a bookie or a casino. On the homeland security front, Streambase's web site strongly highlights the fact that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is not only a user but an investor. Was CEP the underlying factor in the December 25 underwear "systemic failure?"
But what's really important here from an IT investment point of view is that CEP is a five-year-old "next big thing." The Streambase assertion that this is all news to the big enterprise software stack vendors is pure Davos snow. IBM, Oracle (ORCL), TIBCO (TIB), and to a lesser extent Microsoft (MSFT) and Red Hat (RHAT) have been key players in CEP for years. As has the open source software movement.
Streambase, as is the only choice for a small niche player, is rejuvenating the stack vs. pureplay canard just when I thought Progress and IBM had buried it by acquiring Savvion and Lombardi respectively. In fact, CEP is even less a factor in a pureplay vs. stack debate because CEP is an enabling technology, a tool, whereas business process management (BPM) is actually a value proposition.
BPM means something in the real world outside of IT. CEP means something special only in the Alps.
-- Dennis Byron
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