The bbc2010 conference(s) proved pretty busy – 700 was the quoted number of attendees and I estimated 450 at the conference starting keynote. I presented on CEP to a generally benign audience (no rotten fruit was dispatched in my direction, at least) on the Weds; this explained, using some of the use cases we have seen over the past year, how CEP augments neatly the more common decisioning and business process technologies. However my audience may be forgiven for complaining that my discussion of the “event-decision-action” pattern was pretty much a repeat of what IDC’s Stephen Hendryx covered in his Business Rule Engine Market Review in the previous session. One of Stephen’s main messages (that events are important in decisioning) is of course also reflected in vendor efforts:
- TIBCO BusinessEvents has for 2 years now been shipping with a BRMS option – TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager – complete with end-user managed decision table and workflow for controlling access.
- IBM just announced the bundling of their “CEP” and business rules technologies (not to mention a snazzy new icon!)
- Progress Software, well-known for their Apama acquisition, were exhibiting at bbc2010 with their Drools-based BRMS along with their event-driven process dashboard.
It will be interesting to see how far and how fast the CEP+rules world evolves over the next 12 months.
However, the bbc conference series did display one dark cloud – some of the presenters seemed to be playing to the crowd of business analyst attendees with what can only be described as “anti-IT” messages. “Don’t listen to (your) IT (department)!”. And yet, the majority of exhibitors were providing… IT solutions for decision management and execution! As “events” are both business- and IT-relevant, I wonder what this means for any future CEP presentations at this event?
