Call for Public CEP Reference Clients for 2008
Last year The CEP Blog conducted a survey of all public CEP/EP use cases by customers, based on a simple criteria. We asked the various CEP vendors to on various CEP discussion forums, social networking sites like LinkedIn, and mailing lists to review both the criteria and the list, comment and update. We published the results in CEP/EP Reference Customers 2005-2007.
Now that we are beyond the halfway point in 2008 we are going start the process all over again. So please feel free to comment as I start compiling the list again, using the same criteria as last year (However, I reserve the right to slightly modify the criteria if necessary). Basically, the criteria looks like this:
- Must be a (CEP/EP) software vendor.
- Must be an end user / customer.
- Must NOT be a partnership or OEM announcement.
- Must mention complex event processing (CEP) or event processing (EP) in the public statement.
- Must be available on the Internet and in English.
In a nutshell, just as we did last year, we will compile all the CEP/EP public reference clients that mention CEP, the software and the customer. Your are encouraged to post links to your 2008 reference clients in the comment section here. Please include the URL, Date, Source, Software Vendor, Customer Application (Use Case), as in the 2007 worksheet.
Filed under: CEP News and Events, Complex Event Processing, Use Cases
Why do you exclude OEM from the list ? I believe any analyst would consider both direct and indirect sales channels when looking at a company public reference list, especially to put use cases and target markets on the spotlights.
By contrast, I agree partnerships might be out of interest for such a raw list.
Hi Alex,
We exclude partnership announcements because partners are not end users.
We do not exclude OEMs who are announced in the context of an end user solution.
Any firm can announce myriad parterships and OEM agreements. Partners and OEM agreements are not end users sales and deployments.
Yours faithfully, Tim
I assume that in most cases, OEM go far beyond resell / joint sales PR. An OEM is a fairly strategic decision to be made, that goes up to CxO as it is often critical in the buying company go to market and value creation toward its own target market and end users. It usually goes thru technical due diligence, proof of concept, and financials for both license acquisition and integratoin costs, to balance vs haiving a third party dependency. Just as for a direct sale isn’t it?
The little distinction is that an OEM does indeed not mean that the embedded CEP system is right there in production - but I still think this is a thing you should look at when you monitor a technology adoption. I’d thus encourage everyone to post those as well.
Hi Alex,
Great to hear from you.
In reality, many software companies announce OEM and partner agreements for the press releases and market buzz; so it is not safe to make any assumptions, unless you are willing, correctly I think, to also assume that software companies are willing to do just about anything to inflate market perception.
The most difficult thing to achieve is a bone fide public reference from a real end user. Everything else is mostly smoke-and-mirrors.
So, even if a company posts 100 OEM agreements and partners, without end user references they will not be included (period) in our list, designed to be fair to everyone and as factual and accurate as possible.
Yours sincerely, Tim
On first analysis, this has been a very slow year for tangible CEP/EP reference clients. In fact, the numbers have fallen dramatically since 2007. I will have some results up on the net soon.