CEP as another service in the Service Bus

by David Luckham

Several companies have already bundled CEP into larger toolsets or middleware products. Nothing new there! But Phil Howard of Bloor Research has seen fit to single one out in particular, and since he likes it, perhaps this is an indication of the future. Its a small company, iWay which is a subsidiary of a medium size company, Information Builders.

Here’s what Mr. Howard says.

“iWay, the Information Builders subsidiary, has introduced an EIM (enterprise information management) offering. Since the term EIM may not necessarily be clear I had better explain that this is a platform-based approach that spans data integration, data quality and master data management. It also has some interesting wrinkles that are not available from other vendors, which I will come back to. ….”

“The third part of this EIM release is iWay Enable. This is a CEP (complex event processing) engine. It too has been embedded within the Integration Server and acts as an extension to the company’s Service Manager. This is quite important as it means that you can do things like business activity monitoring, performance management and data quality monitoring without having to land the data into a database. This in turn means that you can detect event-level exceptions in real-time without delay.

I have to say that I like this approach. Not just in terms of the CEP engine but also the whole idea of embedding capabilities into an ESB. In effect, this is a turn-around from traditional approaches. Other vendors in this space primarily started as batch vendors and now offer real-time or near-real-time extensions but they are still basically batch products. iWay, on the other hand, has designed its EIM to target real-time requirements and, yes, it can do batch too. Companies whose primary requirements are for real-time processing could do worse than to take a good look at iWay EIM.”

Now that leaves a lot of unanswered questions, not the least being what exactly the CEP capabilities are, and whether what he says about other vendors that have already done the same thing is justified. Perhaps this should be a community discussion? Here’s the link.