What’s Next For CEP Vendors?

by Larry Barrett, InternetNews.com, January 25, 2008IBM on Wednesday made its first significant foray into the emerging but relatively low-profile complex event processing (CEP) market with its acquisition of privately held AptSoft. CEP applications aggregate information from corporate databases and applications in real time and applies rules to discern patterns and events that otherwise would go unnoticed.Having this automated “trigger” can give companies the ability to identify and anticipate problems and opportunities culled from seemingly unrelated events before they transpire. To date, CEP applications have mostly been deployed in the financial services industry—particularly at hedge funds and brokerage firms where detecting trading patterns on the fly is critical—but will soon find a home in other verticals such the advertising, transportation and health care industries.CEP, along with business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) applications, offers more bang for the buck for enterprise customers taking their first baby steps toward a full-scale SOA (define) transformation. Getting IT and business more closely aligned and using all these applications and services to respond to real-world business issues is exactly why vendors like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP might soon be looking to snap up independent CEP vendors to round out their core middleware offerings for SOA-curious customers.Tibco, with its BusinessEvents offering, along with Coral8, Streambase and Aleri are among the most prominent independent CEP vendors developing applications that dig through legacy data to help predict future business events.One can only wonder if these companies’ executives are already predicting their role in what some analysts see as a consolidation frenzy on the horizon. “I don’t know who will go next,” Roy Schulte, an analyst at Gartner, told InternetNews.com. Read article. See the Forum discussion