Tim Bass
Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:55:10 +0000
One of the brillant minds in the CEP community, Claudio Paniagua Macia, recently posted, Event Stream Processing != Complex Event Processing.** In his post, Claudi draws a bold conclusion:

(1) SQL-based approaches to ESP might have a hard time doing CEP.
(2) No real CEP engine exists today in the marketplace, perhaps not even “off” the marketplace.

Friend, colleague, and co-chair Opher Etzion replied, On Event Stream Processing:

*”CEP engines do exist today, none is perfect, but probably sufficient for big majority of the existing applications today.”

Respectfully, I find it necessary to agree with Claudi and disagree with Opher.** Most of the so-called CEP engines today are solving quite simple event processing problems.** If the CEP engines on the market were truly solving a “majority of the exisiting applications today” then*sales would be orders of magnitudes larger.
The fact-of-the-matter is that the current “simple rules-based approach”*dominate in today’s marketplace are used to solve problems where rules-based approaches are*useful.** Unfortunately, this is*just a small*fraction of the true*potential of the CEP market.
For example*(just one example of many),*the vast majority of*intrusion or fraud detection systems available today use rule-based approaches, and their detection capability, and the confidence in the detection, is*quite elementary (poor quality).** If these systems*worked well, cyberspace would be a very different and much safer place.**
Yes, it is useful to add another layer of rules, but rules alone will not solve the vast majority of CEP-domain classes of problems.** In addition, the CEP applications that have made the press recently are quite simple, certainly nothing scientifically earth shattering.
So, the sad truth of the matter, from an architectural, scientific*and solutions perspective, is exactly as Claudi boldly offered, no real CEP engine exists today.*** Furthermore, the vast majority, if not all, CEP applications sold today are used in very simple event processing (SEP) applications.* This is not very “advanced,” but it is a good start.**
What is holding the CEP market back is quite straight forward; the current “engines” are quite elementary (We*should*call*them SEP engines.), relatively speaking, and SEP engines do not have the capability*to solve difficult detection-oriented*CEP problems in cyberspace.***These difficult problems compose the vast majority of the applications where “true*complex event processing”*is required.



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