Thanks to Brenda Michelson for pointing out this Computer Business Review article on SAS (a traditional, historic-data-based analytics vendor) poo-pooing the need for CEP (a real-time, event-driven analytics technology), quoting TIBCO Software’s Al Harrington and Progress Software’s Dr John Bates along with Gartner’s Roy Schulte in the defense of CEP.
Coincidentally (perhaps) SAS is also fighting an uphill battle for its core business against open source R and its TIBCO S+ equivalent. I heard a few competitors at PAW recently admiring the TIBCO Spotfire analytics solution combining business-friendly analytics with visualisation. Unsurprisingly (to me, if not SAS) TIBCO Spotfire is increasingly combined with TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP…
But I would not be surprised if within 24 months SAS announces its own CEP technology, but probably calling it “real time analytics” to save face. Why? Well the SAS message this month was also anti-OSS and anti-cloud, yet SAS simultaneously announced its cloud offerings being expanded. And earlier this year a joint SAS Accenture venture quoted “…two-thirds of senior managers in the US and UK say their top long-term objective is to develop the ability to model and predict behavior, actions and decisions to the point where individual decisions and offers can be made in real time based on the analysis at hand. ”
QED.
[Disclosure: Accenture is also a CEP partner of TIBCO’s…]
