Where’s CEP heading?
Last night some parts of Sweden had a blistering temprature of -38C (-36). A pretty cold night by any standards.
If you like Swedish high-tech take a look at Boston Power. Probably the world best batteries, invented by Christina from Sweden.
Sadly Sweden lacks the start-up culture so many companies do just like Boston Power, they invent here in Sweden and then move to the US to build a company of the innovation. Sweden pays the bills for education and research and US gets the profits from the company building effort. There are a number of other companies in the US that looks American but are actually Swedish.
I have seen a worrying trend in the CEP marketplace recently. The replication of the efforts done by companies which have produced message oriented middleware for integration purposes.
I took a quick look at the current vendors in this space and much of the advertised features compete directly with other message oriented product. Features like event routing/dispatching and transformation looks just like a variation of good old message oriented stuff known to everyone into the integration (EAI) world.
I think that those vendors which fails to realize that this is a problem already solved will have hard time in selling their products.
I asked a tech sales guy what the difference was between their old and widely used businedd integration tool and the new fancy event product. The products I asked about event look similar and you can do most of the stuff in the old tool, but of course there everything is called messages and not events. The answer, well, he was not sure exactly what the difference was once I started to ask about the details. The marketing of the products are certainly different, for any practical purposes I did see no point in investing in the new tool. Apart from the cool factor of having an event processing tool.
The other problem I see is that many vendors position their products in a way so that they are evaluated against traditional databases, BI, DW and other traditional tools. There’s no feeling of "you really, really, really can’t do this with your traditional tools". It works fine for those targeting the financial sector as there the pain of using the traditional tools is just too great.
So, are CEP and CEP vendors doomed? No, not at all. A couple of pure play CEP vendors will survive this crisis and CEP features will find its way into the traditional tools from many vendors. For example, the gains of using CEP to solve finance problems seems to be huge. Suddenly you can solve problems which are unsolvable without CEP. Those who gets this will be rich …
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