First of all, I like to appreciate you for a enlightening podcast over Event-Driven Computing

I have three question for you:
1. How do you deal with change management required for EDA in current IT infrastructure deployed with leagacy systems (like ERP (enabled with Real time reporting) where providing a CEP & BEM plugin to the leagcy system can also solve the purpose).

2. How recognized revenue is justified over such investments in highly volatile technology market as it may happen that till the client reaches the Break even point of investment technology will become outdated

3. What are the technological and business cahllenges faced by both client while adopting EDA and by vendors while delivering EDA products.

Dear Chander,
Thank you for the very good questions:

1. Enterprises should think about event computing more holistically. You have your ERP system, CRM, HR, other legacy, interface to partner systems, etc. Think of your event applications as interfacing with many if not all of these. Plugging in a CEP engine into your ERP system, while technical feasible, may not be really addressing your business needs. Is the ERP system the only one generating and consuming all your events? If not, then you probably need to think about which systems are involved and is a standalone CEP engine enough. There is some change management that will come into play since your existing systems may have to be able to publish events, typically through an adapter, to your event processing infrastructure and be able to receive composite events. However, it is difficult to speculate without knowing specific details, how onerous this may or may not be.

2. This is no different that the risk one undertakes in making most technology investment decisions. However, I would encourage you to disassociate any specific technology from this architectural paradigm that we call event computing. Event computing, like SOA, is here to stay. Life and businesses are event driven and the benefits of the event computing paradigm along with SOA are obvious. What technology and vendor you choose to address your event processing needs, depends on your risk profile, amount you are willing to invest, existing vendor relationships, match between vendors offerings and your short and long term requirements, whether you are focused on a robust infrastructure versus a point problem, etc.

3. Let me address client challenges:
i. The biggest business challenge is lack of knowledge about event processing and its benefits in the business community, as indicated by subject matter experts like the Gartners etc, as well as primary research that we have conducted. The result of this is lack of a business champion in the enterprise to drive the event processing cause forward and the lack of understanding of the business value proposition. IT architects are currently the biggest EDA proponents in the enterprise.

ii. The biggest technological challenge is the lack of an EDA-specific project budget. Most current EDA projects are tied into SOA/BPM projects, which is not a bad thing, in an of itself. Except it is an indicator of the fact that the amount of EDA investments is still at its infancy.

I appreciate such an endeavour being championed by BEA and agree that most of the time our brain processes the events unconsciously and reacts to the events.

I have worked on creating an event driven framework and have some thing to share about. Unless the concept and realtime value addition to the companies is educated it is very difficult to pursue on such challenging efforts. I would love to see any kind of progress on this technology.