Joe McKendrick over on eBizQ has claimed that CEP is on the verge of enterprise acceptance, subject to “prices being lowered”. That’s an interesting comment – taken it seems from the recent IEEE report on CEP – it’s as if the author spoke to some CIOs who said they would buy into CEP only when the price comes down. But who’s price? Compared to what? Versus what ROI?
Taking TIBCO BusinessEvents as an example of an enterprise CEP system, included “out of the box” you get:
- inference engine
- continuous query engine
- state machine engine
- UML-based modeling tools with model-to-event-driven-system generator (model driven engineering and all that)
- decision management system with business user interface
- high performance+resilient distributed agent platform with multiple configuration options
- distributed in-memory OODB with connections to a RDBMS for backup
- event channels for popular event sources like JMS and TIBCO’s RV
- powerful XML processing tools
- extensibility mechanism via Java.
Seemingly, there are not many complaints about the value proposition here. Sourcing these components separately would cost an arm and a leg, and integrating them would cost guts and all.
So perhaps “prices are lowering” was referring to the availability of tools like BusinessEvents versus enterprises having to build and support their own solutions at far greater cost?
