Transforming Businesses into Event-Enabled Enterprises
The previous CEP Market review earlier this year had a few suggestions for new entries: so we ‘ve updated the chart with what data we could find. Hope this is useful.
Note: please comment on this post any suggested changes, births, deaths and marriages in the event processing tooling market, and I’ll incorporate the changes in the next version.
Time for an update for the CEP Market Survey. Jerry Baulier (who has departed from SAP Sybase Aleri) had mentioned to me another research project for the history timeline, and last year’s DEBS conference reminded me I had omitted Truviso. And then in the last week or so we have seen the Germans arrive in force, with the SAP BusinessObjects announcement of its repackaging of the Sybase Aleri product (alongside their in-memory database Hana that could in future compete with TIBCO ActiveSpaces) and SoftwareAG announce the renaming of its recent CEP acquisition this year (yet another product name based on Business Events!). Elsewhere there is speculation on the CEP market following all the recent acquisitions in the fast-database market …
Thanks to SeekingAlpha for the Q3 Earnings Call with analysts transcription. Items of interest to the CEP market watchers are:
COO, Murray Rode: … Our business optimization portfolio grew 70% over last year, driven by both Business Events and Spotfire. …
Analyst: Okay. Then the growth in optimization was pretty amazing. Could you talk a little bit about was that weighted more towards Spotfire or CEP and what was the – a little more detail behind the drivers there?
CEO, Vivek Ranadive: We’re seeing strong growth from both areas Nabil, and Spotfire is obviously very strong, but we saw very, very strong growth in CEP as well. The two of them are actually are starting to play well together and there isn’t a customer on the planet, I don’t care what industry you’re in, but everybody is trying to create the next generation of customer loyalty programs, and you just can’t do that with transactional database 20th century technology. So people want to be able look at events and then make offers on the spot based on those events. So this is a huge opportunity for both Spotfire and CEP.
A recent CEP RFP requested marketshare data for the “CEP market“, worldwide and in specific territories. Presumably the contracts departments for large enterprises are hoping that software development tool purchases are tracked by some industry body (Nielsens maybe) just like Cornflake packets and Persil washing powder. Unfortunately, this is not the case – and of course the definition of “customer” is itself open to interpretation (someone who uses the software? someone who paid money for the software? a licensee?). Some companies also embed “CEP software” in larger categories of software (e.g. messaging or BAM); others sell only stacks that might include CEP licenses, without necessarily any use of said licenses.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to try and find some data points here. Software companies generally make “customer numbers” claims via press releases and in analyst reports, as well as SEC etc reports, and these can be collated and cross-referenced to try and come to a “big picture”. Doing so finds some interesting details such as:
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?
So more consolidation announcements mean its time to update the CEP Market graphic. And an observation that the 10th anniversary of CEP technology is nigh, per some vendors’ start dates. Probably we should really celebrate the first decade of CEP on the anniversary of David Luckham’s book in 2 years.
I had a comment on the “start dates” for solutions in the last iteration… however my excuse is that neither I, nor Google, have good access to this (occasionally sensitive) information. I have tried to set the “start point” for a “CEP offering” as the first customer announcement / sale, except for the solutions which no longer exist (which are simply there for as a historical record). Of course, updates, suggestions and ommisions gratefuly received.
One thing I will try and expand for next time is the *type* of CEP technology used or offered. For example, which of these offer cache, or graphical dashboards, or other techniques? It might also be useful to have a rough idea (where available) of the number of users / market share, which is data usually given to the analyst companies.
I thought it would be a good time to update the CEP Market diagram. This covers all the main event processing application development tools (as far as I know). Compared to, say, the EPTS membership list there will be a mismatch – some EPTS members have not announced products yet, are in conventional (as in, not continuous / complex) event processing, or are focused on research.
I also thought it might be a good idea to bend the original rule for inclusion to add some of the fruits of the main players in CEP such as Dr Luckham’s Stanford spin-off ePatterns, as mentioned in his “Short History of CEP”.
It’s quite likely we’ll see more CEP merger and acquisition activity in 2010. Meanwhile it is the BPMS market that is currently in the news with a spate of takeovers (i.e. IBM with Lombardi, and Progress with Savvion). BPM is of course related to (and indeed a type of) event processing, albeit with a focus on standard operating procedures and processes (exemplified by the “human-oriented simple event processing” that is workflow); but then, BPM is also considered a much larger market than CEP – at least in the first decade of the the 21st centory.
TIBCO’s contributions to event processing innovations in 2010 start appearing in merely a few weeks – it should be a good year!
Notes:
Start dates for tools and tool classification are not guaranteed:
Yet Another Analyst report means that Forrester has joined Gartner, IDC, and Bloor (and possibly a few others) with coverage of, and comparisons between, CEP vendors.
The Forrester CEP Wave for Q3 2009 was done by Mike Gualtieri and John Rymer who, whilst perhaps being new to the field of CEP, have previously covered the BRE and BRMS market [*1] for Forrester. Although many people realise there is both an affinity and synergy between event processing and business rules, one suspects the authors are keeping such thoughts to themselves in describing CEP as a “hot new enterprise middleware category” (per Mike’s blog). Presumably they use this description because CEP systems can be event sources as well as sinks – but on the other hand so can many other types of system, so overall “middleware” probably isn’t the best description one could use.
Interestingly this report does not use or refer to Forrester’s previous classification of event processing systems.
The good news for CEP users is that there are clearly no “weak” offerings in the CEP market!
I always thought Rolando Hernandez had an excellent idea with his “BRE Family Tree” – and had at some point tried to persuade Prof Luckham to do something similar for the “CEP market”. I was reminded of this by Opher’s blog on CEP and EDA in the current Gartner “hype cycle”, and as I had recently drafted such a CEP version for an internal presentation I decided to post it up here. The chart purports to show the “main players” in CEP today. Probably I’m missing some startups, or R&D offerings that have been commercially sold, and the start dates for such “commercial offerings” may be open to debate. But it shows the main players, at least. And it will be interesting to see how this evolves over the next year or so!
Dr John Bates of Apama, cofounder of one of the earliest vendors in the CEP space, gave a very nice keynote presentation at DEBS. Apama’s view on CEP market trends include things like location-aware telco services such as real-time dating (!), transport and logistics, etc. In particular John predicted:
One automatically respects speakers when they politely reference their industry competitors – for example John gave due credit to TIBCO for pushing event processing in market areas beyond Capital Markets, as well as rule-engine-based event processing. And there was nothing in John’s presentation we could disagree (much) with. Except maybe the need for that CEP-driven dating thing…
[Disclaimer: Apama is a competitor to TIBCO BusinessEvents in the CEP market].
