Neo
08-06-2008 08:30 AM
I am back at the glaring computer screen*after a day in Lamphun, Northern Thailand, hanging out will my friends who are preparing for a Bonsai tree competition.**I spent the day*eating Thai and Chinese food and relaxing in a lounge chair under imported blue palm trees with the sound of exotic birds making background music to keep me entertained.

Back to CEP and EPTS, there are folks*who appear to believe*they may*define “CEP” by the current use cases from self-described CEP vendors. Frankly speaking, I am puzzled by the bottom-up approach.

The*bottom-up approach*is a bit like saying “We have a lot of prototype rockets being built, so let’s define the future of space travel based on the prototypes!”

It really makes little sense, at least to me,*to attempt to define CEP based on what the current generation products (self-described CEP products) are capable of doing.***

From my persective, it*would*be more*beneficial*to customers*to define the types of complex events*(and situations)*businesses need to detect in real-time and*match the technologies and solution architectures*to detect those events, in real-time, with high confidence.

A lot of this “top down thinking” has been already done.

IT businesses need to detect operational threats and problems, and be able to pinpoint, with very high accuracy, where the problem is in a complex network, for example.* This problem remains mostly*unsolved with a very*low sigaal-to-noise ratio.

Also, most*businesses*would like*to detect fraud and other criminal activity on their network before*the activities*adversely*impacts their business.** This*problem remains unsolved for most companies.

Scientific researchers*seek*models of weather, epidemiology, and so much more; and they need event processing solutions to obtain situational knowledge into current events and predict future ones.* We know how difficult predicting the weather can be!

Folks on the ground need to model urban traffic as events and design better event-driven traffic models and solutions.

The list of important event processing challenges we face go on and on.**

While I see some merit in the bottom-up approach, it is better for users to define what are practical “complex event” related problems and then look for the solutions, vs. define the solution and then look for the problem.

From a strategic perspective,* self-fulfilling CEP use case studies are interesting, but they should not limit the vision, definition, and future of processing complex events.



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