vincent
01-07-2009 04:04 PM
Sometime one has to take what one reads on the web with a liberal pinch of salt. I was amused to read on Intelligent Enterprise in the last few days that:

1. CEP is a “BI Megatrend”
2. CEP is a “marketing device”
3. CEP to be provided by IBM’s latest (rule engine) technology acquisition - presumably either alongside, or replacing, their “Appsoft” (per the article) acquisition… [*1]

The first article is the most interesting: the BI megatrends also of interest to us in complex event processing are:

- BI users demanding richer experiences / exploration of relationships: this is where highly visual tools like TIBCO Spotfire play in historical data analysis, and TIBCO Syndera in operational intelligence…

- Business modeling meets MDM: frankly this is a stretch for traditional BI, but certainly MDM tools like TIBCO CIM have a semantic angle, although this angle is usually downstream of the development of the concept models defined in TIBCO BusinessEvents [*2] or existing operational data source schema. The same semantics affect ETL (per the article), which also cross-links to event processing technologies: one of the use cases for TIBCO BusinessEvents is “intelligent” ETL (a.k.a. event-driven rule-based transformations).

- Breaking the BI/DW Mold: of course there is nothing mouldy about data warehouses! But this is talking about in-memory and other “unconventional” data stores for doing “operational” BI, or operational intelligence. We already see these in the CEP world with high performance event stores as data grids.

- MapReduce meets large scale data analysis: MapReduce is more about highly parallel operations rather than more course-grained event pattern detection. But despite the difference in granularity, both MapReduce and TIBCO BusinessEvents are agent-based distributed systems for collaboratively solving large scale problems…

- Column Oriented databases: this could be a red herring, as these are still static-query-oriented databases. But is the world moving towards continuous queries against real-time event-driven information sources, or even tuple and object stores?

- Event Processing for analytics: this made some sense, although the authors seemed to want to tie event processing to BI and data warehouse systems, rather than the other way round. Surely BI’s role is to identify the event and data patterns for use in operational event-based decisions? So BI should help CEP solutions, not the other way round?

Maybe 2009 will be interesting after all!

Notes:

[1]* Why sell your customers 1 CEP tool when you can sell them 3 or 4?

[2] TIBCO watchers may be interested to note that TIBCO CIM (MDM) and TIBCO BusinessEvents (CEP) are part of the same business unit …



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