I don’t know how I missed this, but I just spotted James‘ and Neil‘s sponsored article on “Technology for Operational Decision Making”, which includes one or two references to Complex Event Processing and supporting concepts.
Although one should refrain from commenting on other vendor’s marketing material, this document does not directly reference the (non-event processing) sponsors except in an appendix – so hopefully they and the author’s won’t mind me making a few observations from the CEP perspective…
- I note the title is “Operational” DM, not “Enterprise”. Is this a play for some new jargon like “ODM” (i.e. Operational Decision Management)? Kind of makes sense, in that (CEP supports) operational decisioning is a component of operational intelligence, and we don’t see such attention paid to non-operational (strategic, BMM-level) decisions – yet. [But I don’t think the ontologists will be happy if someone goes with ODM!]
- James and Neil refer to EDA and event correlation (winning brownie points from the CEP crowd) supporting operational decisions. But then they lose it, referring to “real time data” (and not “events”) driving the decisions. In case anyone argues that we should view “events” are merely some subtype of “data”, recall that we generally don’t see equivalent terms like “data driven architecture” (vs EDA) and “data correlation” (vs event correlation) in an “operational” context.
- The “event store” is defined as existing to “allow events not otherwise persisted to be analyzed”. Well, presumably you wouldn’t store events just to discard them, would you… The usual (CEP) usage for “event store” is as a (high performance) event persistence layer to allow events to be used in time-based event patterns (and over multiple Event Processing Agents on a distributed system).
- “Click stream data” processing can probably be viewed (where the stream is analysed on the fly) as a specialist application of CEP (or more accurately, ESP). But there are other event streams that are of use in specific decisioning application domains, too…
- “Decisions-as-a-Service” – not that sounds like something out of a Monty Python skit: “You want to return that parrot? Hang on a mo, I have to log on to ‘the cloud’…” [I know they were thinking of the analytics part, but anyway…]
- “It is this cross organization, cross-channel consistency that is best achieved using a Service Oriented Architecture (i.e., web services designs).” Actually, that is the sweet spot for EDA and the event servers that provide CEP – any event, from any channel, any time. And with low latency.
So overall: its an interesting read, but doesn’t paint the full picture from the CEP state-of-the-art perspective – for example it would need some updating to cover TIBCO’s growing CEP customer use-cases in this area.
Disclosure: Neil has worked with the TIBCO Spotfire group in the past. And Paul is an ex-colleague of James…
