A Short History of Complex Event Processing Part 2: the rise of CEP

by David Luckham

This second article follows on from part 1 on the history of complex event processing

CEP is the logical and obvious next step in the development of event processing that was described in our first article.   The explosion of event traffic over the past twenty years has created a new set of demands. The IT layers of any major company (i.e., the company’s networks, middleware,  enterprise service bus and websites) are humming with this traffic and people want to listen in. This created a demand to extract information from the event traffic.  As we shall see, it is difficult to think of anything else that could have taken place in event processing at a particular point in time, around 2000, but CEP. The final question, yet to be answered of course, is about the future and what will eventually happen in event processing.  Download pdf article.