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When everybody starts to agree that something is bound to be the next big thing, I get jumpy. When people start ramming the Business word in to create a new acronym, I get really jumpy. Complex Event Processing has been getting hype for a while and now IBM (according to Joe) has committed the crime:

“IBM wants to take the technical allusions out of the term itself, referring to it as “Business Event Processing.” The renaming to BEP makes sense, since I doubt if a concept that starts with the word “complex” is going to win a lot of converts.”

However, I don’t disagree with sentiment that CEP could be the next big thing. It has been considered and used a little to deal with the general increase of data volumes in some industries (financial services being in the “lead” as I covered here ).

However, there is potentially much more opportunity in the SOA context as IBM seem to recognize. As the volume of network traffic related to SOA increases, the need increases to monitor, manage and react to anomalies. Anomalies which could correspond to simple human error, to unexpected loads and even to illegal or fraudulent behaviour. Detecting an anomaly may require looking into an event, detecting specific sequences of events or any arbitary combinations of the above. CEP provides a good approach to detecting subtle anomalies occurring in massive message flows in real-time. While you could have used CEP (if it had existed) in the pre-SOA world, it would not have made much business sense: SOA potentially divides many more business processes between applications (into the SOA layer) and also increases the total volume of messages. The combination makes the total value of the messages in the SOA layer significant and therefore controlling the SOA layer becomes as important as managing applications.

The caveat is how quickly and in how many organisations if at all will this level of SOA deployment occur. I remember talking to a senior architect in a US bank last year who was pro-SOA but would never consider shifting the centre of gravity of business processes out of applications. Hence he would never need the sort of CEP control layer capability that I was proposing.

Time will tell – as with most “next big things”, it will take longer and be less massive but CEP will certainly be discussed and used in increasing levels throughout 2008 and beyond. And no, I don't think many people will call it BEP any time soon.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in CEP • Mash ups |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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