Complex Event Processing Opportunity Analysis and Assessment of Key Products

E X C E R P T C o m p l e x E v e n t P r o c e s s i n g O p p o r t u n i t y A n a l y s i s a n d A s s e s s m e n t o f K e y P r o d u c t s ( E x c e r p t f r o m I D C # 2 1 5 7 8 5 ) Maureen Fleming Jeff Silverstein
I N T H I S E X C E R P T
The content for this excerpt was taken directly from the IDC Customer Needs and Strategies Report, Complex Event Processing Opportunity Analysis and Assessment moc. of Key Products, by Maureen Fleming and Jeff Silverstein (Doc # 215785). All or part cdi. of the following sections are included in this excerpt: IDC Opinion, Situation Overview, ww and Vendor Profile. Also included is Table 1 and Figure 2 & 16. w 5104.5 I D C O P I N I O N 39.80 Most applications depend on users to ask an application to perform a task. With the 5.F widespread collapse of our economy, it is clear that this approach is no longer valid 00 for many types of mission-critical applications that involve managing risk and for 28. important areas of customer service. The new paradigm requires an event-driven 278 approach that tells users when they need to take action. Complex event processing .80 (CEP) software will take on the application server role for these new event-driven 5.P systems. Other findings include: ASU ` We estimate that CEP software will grow 65% in 2008 to approximately $140 107 million, making CEP the fastest-growing segment of middleware for the second 10 year in a row. AM ,ma ` The small size of this market disguises its growing importance as the anchor hgn product in multimillion-dollar event-driven infrastructure deals. imarF ` Depending on the application requirements and the role and skills of the most tee active group of users, the importance of certain capabilities over others drives the rtS selection process. There is no single best-of-breed CEP product in every nee important area. To one buyer, a capability may be mission critical, while to pS another buyer, that same capability may be viewed as needlessly costly and 5 :sr complex. etrauq ` While CEP is covered most heavily in relationship to financial trading systems, dae this covered only 30% of total spending in 2007 and 2008. There is also H la significant coverage of stream processing vendors, yet enterprises spent bol significantly more on rules- and model-oriented CEP engines in 2007 and 2008. G

Filing Information: February 2009, IDC #215785e, Volume: 1 GMS Licensed Content: Excerpt S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W C E P : T h e B r a i n s o f a n E v e n t - D r i v e n S y s t e m
In many ways, a CEP engine can be likened to the brains of an event-driven system. It receives messages from an MOM, relates the new message to what is already in its term memory, quickly identifies problems and opportunities, and sends instructions to other systems to take action.
In the mid-1990s, academic research began at Cal Tech (Mani Chandy), Cambridge University (John Bates), and Stanford University (David Luckham) in the field of event processing, with the intent of developing a new approach to real-time identification of sequences of related events.
At the time, systems were capable of processing a single event, such as a stock price, but there was no automatic way to rapidly relate that event to others without extensive coding. The larger the code, the more challenging it was to make changes. Those groups that invested in the code were left with brittle, nondynamic systems.
This problem resulted in research and product development to build engines that could receive, normalize, and correlate streams of data against models of conditions - or predescribed event patterns - that needed monitoring.
In a 2002 book by Luckham, The Power of Events: An Introduction to Complex Event Processing in Distributed Enterprise Systems, the concept of an "accessible information gap" was described as "the difference between the level at which we can monitor activities in a system and the level of activities we want to know about."
From that perspective, CEP closes the gap between low-level system activities and higher-level information to which people and systems can respond. As the brains of an event-dr... [download for more]