Tim Bass
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:42:25 +0000
My friend Opher mistakenly thought I was thinking of him when I*related the story of the fish, as he*replied,
CEP and the Story of the Captured Traveller.
I must not not have related*the*
fish story very well, because to understood the story of the fish, is to know that we are all like the fish, in certain aspects of life, and there is nothing negative to be gleaned from the story.
However, to Opher’s point on CEP, I disagree.** Just because the marketing people (not the market) has misdefined CEP and therefore the vendors are drifting from the technology described in Dr. Luckham’s
original CEP work, including
his CEP book, we now need to define a new term.*** I don’t agree we should redefine CEP, as*David envisioned,*as Intelligent Event Processing (IEP) because CEP, as today’s software vendors sell it,*is really SEP (or whatever!)
The fact of the matter is that the software marketing folks have decided they are going to use Dr. Luckham’s book to sell software that does not perform as Dr. Luckham described or envisioned!** I make no apologies for being on the side of end users who actually need to solve complex problems, not sell software that underperforms.
As I mentioned, this positioning and repositioning does not help solve complex problems.** At the end of the day, we have problems to solve and the software community is not very helpful when they place form over substance time and time again.*
And, as most customers are saying, time and time again, “so what?” … “these COTS event processing platforms with simple joins and rules do not solve my complex event processing problems.”* “We already have similar approaches, where we have spent millions of dollars,*and they do not work well.”
In other words, the market is crying out for true COTS CEP solutions, but the software community is not delivering.**OBTW, this is nothing new.* In my first briefing to the EP community in January of 2006, I mentioned that CEP required stating the business problem, or domain problem, and then selecting the method or methods that best solve the problem or problems.
To date, the CEP community has not done this because they have no COTS tool set other than SEP engines (marketed as either ESP engines or CEP engines - and at least ESP was closer to being technically accurate.)*
Experienced end users are very intelligent.*
They know the complex event processing problems they need to solve; and they know the limitations of the current COTS approaches marketed by the CEP community.* Even in Thailand, a country many of you might mistakenly think is not very advanced technologically, there are experts in telecommunications (who run large networks) who are working on very difficult fraud detection applications, and they use neural networks and say the results are very good.** However, there is not one CEP vendor, that I know of, who offers true CEP capability.
Almost every major bank, telco, etc. has the same opinion. They need much more capability than joins, selects*and rules to solve their complex event processing problems that Dr. Luckham outlined in his book.** The software vendors are attempting to define the CEP market; unfortunately, their capabilities do not meet the*requirements of the vast majority of end users who have CEP problems to solve.
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