JT has blogged about Forrester’s report on CEP and Business Rule platforms (which I haven’t seen yet). James concurs with the Forrester authors that CEP and BR (ie BRMS) platforms are “complementary” and adds that “Decision Management” would be a better term for the latter – indeed true as most BRMS are only concerned with those business rules that are operational decisions. At TIBCO we process both complex events as well as (managed) decisions, all in the same event processing platform that is our BusinessEvents product. Possibly this is the source of confusion for some people: a CEP tool that is also a BRMS.
The one, really big, difference between Complex Event Processing and traditional BRMS tools is that the former is loosely associated with EDA and decisions that are based on multiple events, whereas the latter is more associated with conventional request-reply SOA and automating decisions made in managed business processes.
One could observe, of course, that a simple event driving an SOA decision service is just a simplification of a complex event driving a CEP decision agent. Hence TIBCO BusinessEvents is also used as a “BRMS” for TIBCO BusinessWorks applications, although of course the latter can invoke pretty much *any* rule engine if required.
One final observation: David Luckham commented on the need for rule management in CEP 2 years ago, when comparing CEP and ESP tools (see para19 under “other challenges”).
