Tim Bass
08-27-2008 06:37 AM
A post in *Technology content of current CEP products?*reminds me of why I rarely, if ever, agree with anything that comes out of Aleri’s marketing team.** To fair to Jeff, it is not only Aleri but others, who continually misdefine business process management (BPM) as CEP.

Jeff uses*the example, “Smart Order Routing” as an example of taking an event and routing the resulting market order match based on some simple rules.*** Routing a order kicked off by a simple order match against a deep liquidity pool (or other market factor) does not define*complex event processing nor*detecting a complex event -*the core idea behind CEP.** Order routing based on simple rules is BPM, plain and simple.

Let’s take another example, fraud.* In this example, there is some complex neural network monitoring for credit card fraud and a potential fraud is detected - this is CEP, detecting a complex event based on some sophisticated analytics.***

After a possible fraud has been detected, a process looks into a database and the routes the incident to someone in the company who is a (1) specialist in credit card fraud, (2) working at the same time of the discovered threat, and (3) immediately available*to act on this*type of task.** Routing the incident is not CEP, it is BPM.

Jeff makes the argument that it is OK to call*an event-driven*BPM task CEP because “it fits the EPTS definition” in the CEP glossary.** He also avoids the discussion of detection accuracy, and instead insists that latency is a*”very important” factor in a CEP application.

If you read the various post by vendors in the blog-o-sphere, it is obvious that they are*continually defining*CEP as BAM, BPM, BRE, BRMS, SOA and just about every other related processing activity that is complimentary to*the event correlation and analysis required to detect*an opportunity or threat to your business.

I’m not picking on Aleri.* TIBCO has been doing the same thing recently in their CEP blog, continually attempting to redefine CEP as BRMS.*** Detecting business opportunities and threats with high confidence requires sophisticated analytics, and their tools have not yet evolved to “real CEP” capabilities.* Instead,*vendors are attempting to redefine BPM, BRMS, BRE, and even SOA*to some degree, as CEP.*

CEP is Not BPM, BAM, BRE, BRMS or SOA.



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