Yet Another Analyst report means that Forrester has joined Gartner, IDC, and Bloor (and possibly a few others) with coverage of, and comparisons between, CEP vendors.
The Forrester CEP Wave for Q3 2009 was done by Mike Gualtieri and John Rymer who, whilst perhaps being new to the field of CEP, have previously covered the BRE and BRMS market [*1] for Forrester. Although many people realise there is both an affinity and synergy between event processing and business rules, one suspects the authors are keeping such thoughts to themselves in describing CEP as a “hot new enterprise middleware category” (per Mike’s blog). Presumably they use this description because CEP systems can be event sources as well as sinks – but on the other hand so can many other types of system, so overall “middleware” probably isn’t the best description one could use.
Interestingly this report does not use or refer to Forrester’s previous classification of event processing systems.
The good news for CEP users is that there are clearly no “weak” offerings in the CEP market!
