All is Good
Soon it’s Christmas, at least in some parts of the world. The holiday that once had some religious meaning. Can’t even remember what it was all about, says a bit about my religion skills…
A couple of weeks ago I took a look at StreamBase, who are kind enough to provide free evaluation downloads, and they are certainly starting to get all bits and pieces in place. If you need to do real-time calculation on a data stream, this is probably one of the best ways to go about it. So stop all that custom development that you first thought of. Aleri/Coral8 is in the same camp so is might be a matter of taste which one to go for.
So if you have a continuous stream of data, perhaps some financial information that changes all the time like prices, then stop developing yourself and look at these tools instead.
Next I tried to see if I could find more about Apama, and Progress is going in the right direction with Apama. Not only that Mr. Apama is now CTO of Progress, but I like their approach with rules (working at ruleCore that would make sense, would it not? ;) ) Expect lots of interesting developments from the Apama team next year. Maybe integration with other technologies like BPM engines?
A friend I know at IBM said that we could expect that it takes a couple of years to IBMify anything that they buy. The start is slow but when they get the speed up they can at best be unstoppable. So next year should be the year of AptSoft, er, IBM Business Events (with or without space? I can’t seems to never remember if it’s IBM or Tibco that uses the space there)
Speaking of Tibco, I think Tibco’s interest in selling CEP software is a good sign that there’s money to be made in the CEP field. Being the masters of building wealth by selling infrastructure software.
The presence of these big players in the CEP field is what actually makes "CEP Software" its own segment. Now we see that customers are actually asking for "solution based on CEP", not that our beloved customer always know that they are asking for. But at least they are asking for it. I would say that this formation of a CEP market is thanks to the collective marketing efforts of all these big vendors. We smaller vendors can’t create a new field within IT. But we can work in one, created by the big ones.
In addition to the bigger ones, there are a number of small vendors too. Providing parts of the solution which sometimes might be a better solution, for many reasons, than going with the bigger vendors. There’s of course our very own ruleCore, there’s the free and gratis open source Esper, we have EventZero, SQLStream, RTM, Pion, WestGlobal, Truviso and other small vendors all building companies around CEP technology. All with their own twist to it.
What about Microsoft? Did I forget them? No, not at all. There’s StreamInsight. But it is way too early to say in what form it will be available in the future. But at least someone at Microsoft thinks that CEP is worth putting developer dollars into. Somebody did convince his manager to give him a budget to build this CEP thingy and actually got an approved budget to work with. Another very good sign. But I would expect that, following Microsoft tradition, that their offering will be mostly usable in a pure Microsoft world. Don’t expect something that fits smoothly into your brand new EDA/SOA master piece. I would guess that the same is true for Oracle’s CQL. CQL adds interesting capabilities into their RDBMS, which is good. Provided that you use it. For others, it might not be that interesting. I don’t think anyone buys a Oracle license just for CQL.
That sort of sums it up. If we can avoid abandoned open source projects, companies that run out of cash or products being dropped we can look forward for a very exciting year for CEP in 2010.
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