Thanks to Alan for pointing out another reference to CEP and alphabet soups (indeed it seems there is “nothing new under the sun” as the saying goes – or maybe this is an indication of an “‘alphabet soup’ soup”?). The reference is this article on “Event-processing Alphabet Soup” from DMReview in Jan 2007. The article is by Larry Goldman and is a good read (albeit with some debatable points – for example, why would you need visualization tools that scale to thousands of users, unless you want “non-real”-time performance and a fancy screensaver? And what is really meant by the term “real-time analytics” anyway?).