It seems that publishing the CEP Market survey is a “preceding event” for some change in the market – no sooner do we update the 2010 market view then another vendor adjustment takes place. Last month mid-tier RDBMS vendor Sybase got acquired by ERP vendor SAP (completing a chain of new corporate identities for Coral8 employees who became Aleri in Mar09, Sybase in Feb10, and now SAP in May10)…
We also made a few other updates, such as adding in the IBM R&D Amit product – the one that IBM management decided to bypass when it acquired Aptsoft to be its “version of Business Events” in 2008. I hadn’t realised that Amit was embedded in a few other IBM product offerings… so is worthy of inclusion in the chart. I adjusted a few other start times based on evidence of “first customer project” too – but clearly that data is still more subjective than it could be.
So – what will change next?
Paul,
This is an interesting survey. Thank you for compiling.
I am writing to provide additional details on Vitria’s M3O. Since I work for Vitria I’m admittedly biased, but given the core CEP capabilities of M3O I believe it fits squarely in your survey.
M3O is not so much an application as an integrated suite of capabilities used to deliver what we call Operational Intelligence applications and solutions. Operational Intelligence is a new approach for decision-making that ensures the optimal response to any event or combination of events is initiated at the right time.
Operational Intelligence provides three key capabilities:
• Visibility — the ability to see and access information from a wide variety of sources using a rich and interactive user interface
• Insight — the ability to analyze and draw conclusions from multiple real-time and historical data sources as the information changes
• Action — the ability to respond in a meaningful way to positively impact business, processes, and customers
M3O brings together in one integrated, built-from-the-ground-up suite visibility via rich Web 2.0 dashboards, insight from powerful analytics via Complex Event Processing (CEP), and policy-based action with integrated business process management (BPM).
M3O’s CEP engine is query-based but unlike a lot of others it is XQuery-based. Vitria’s unique approach –StreamXQuery(tm) — to analyzing real-time XML event data has a number of important advantages over other types of CEP engines.
For more information I’ll point you to a whitepaper on http://www.vitria.com, from which I’ve pulled much of the above:
http://www.vitria.marketbright.com/pages/start/demo-download-campaign/index.html?Campaign_Id=530&Activity_Id=790&Action=http://www.vitria.com/wp-content/download/Complex%20Event%20Processing%20for%20Operational%20Intelligence_3_16_10.pdf
Alternatively goto http://www.vitria.com/resources/downloads/ and scan down to the White Paper section until you find Complex Event Processing for Operational Intelligence.
Cheers,
Brian
Thanks Brian – interesting that you have extended XQuery to do stream processing (presumably of XML docs in middleware). No reason why not, of course, as XQuery is related to SQL as is the OQL we use in TIBCO. Wonder if you have to define your post-query behavior language as XPATH expressions though…
The WP you reference seems to be a bit heavy on marketing promotion material (indeed WordPress identified your comment as spam, so my apologies for not responding earlier): for example the WP claims:
There are two major types of CEP engines on the market: • Query-based—applies database-like queries against event streams • State-based—represents expected sequences of events as fnite state machine models …
This seems to omit the idea of ECA rules etc – see the market survey for a more detailed classification of Event Processing Languages! For example, I would argue that continuous query engines also need to store state – the state of the continuous query in between events in particular. Other than the (optional) State Model in TIBCO BusinessEvents, I’m not aware of any others that use a pure state machine approach (although arguably the Apama EPL does something similar, and maybe some of the newer smaller entries do too).
Query-based CEP engines are the most general-purpose and widely used CEP engines and they cover all the CEP use cases listed…. In contrast, state machine-based CEP engines are designed to excel at sequence and pattern matching with high transaction volumes over long time durations, but are less fexible than query-based engines in addressing the full range of CEP use cases. Implementing aggregations, correlations, time-series analysis, and so on in state-based engines generally requires relatively complex programming in a proprietary event programming language, rather than using relatively simple declarative queries
Drawing a state machine is complex programming? Maybe for some. Also the evidence seems to point to query languages being used predominantly for event stream processing and thence predominantly in investment banking against financial data feeds – hardly “more general purpose”.
Etc.
Oh well, in any case, thanks for the reference, and good luck with entering the CEP market
.
PS: The CEP market diagram tries to use as a start date not the appearance of marketing materials or product announcements but the first reported customer useage date – where applicable
. I’ve not yet seen any web or analyst references to any Vitria M3O CEP customers, so if you could point me towards such a reference I’ll gladly include the Vitria CEP solution data in the next version of the survey!
Cheers
I received a few other vendor suggestions to add to this list:
- Truviso – a real-time BAM tool similar to TIBCO Syndera and BE Views
- Vitria M3O – I haven’t found any references to users on the web, so am not sure if it is a CEP tool or rather an application that uses CEP…
I’ll look into these more for the next version, thanks.
Cheers