Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Marc Adler follows on from Muddy Waters to The First Annual Fluffies for CEP where Marc also calls into question the transparency, credibility and accuracy of the various fluffy “awards” we see from time-to-time.
When I discussed this openly with Waters in Muddy Waters comments they kindly replied that “customers are loath to be a reference client for a vendor,” like this fact somehow justifies having 600 people, most who have never actually used the software in practice, vote on how great it is.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road.
Or, as Mark Adler pointed out in his well written blog post The First Annual Fluffies for CEP , a secretive “panel of renowned judge” is going to tell us, via Jolt, who has the better solution? Holy Cow Batman! Let me buy a nice layout in your magazine or web site, please, so “my software company” will be on the short list for the “the awards”.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road.
All this smoke-and-mirrors. share-the-love, marketing reminds me of The Matrix a bit, where the world as we observe it, is a complete artificial construction, where most people in the Matrix believe they are “real” because they do not know that they really just a computer generated program designed to keep humans happy as they sleep in some cold goop with electrodes stuck up their you-know-what, really just bio-batteries insuring the light bill is paid.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road.
Or better yet, these fluffies are similar to most of the Webinars we see where there are questions from “the audience” but we know that most of these questions did not come from the “audience” - yet we all seem to continue ”the audience” myth just like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny!
Follow the Yellow Brick Road.
The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Fluffy Awards are real, if you want them to be real. Just close your eyes and click your heels three times….
Follow the Yellow Brick Road. Follow the Yellow Brick Road.
Follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow the Yellow Brick Road.
Follow the Yellow Brick, Follow the Yellow Brick,
Follow the Yellow Brick Road.
We’re off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
You’ll find he is a whiz of a Wiz! If ever a Wiz! there was.
If ever oh ever a Wiz! there was The Wizard of Oz is one because,
Because, because, because, because, because.
Because of the wonderful things he does.
We’re off to see the Wizard. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Filed under: Complex Event Processing, Humor
Tim,
Just for the record, all of my webinars are live…
One interesting side effect of all the hype in this business is its impact on other CEP/ESP firms looking for VC based investment. At SIFMA this year, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone professing to have the next big thing in CEP*. In addition to your public list of reference accounts, I think it would be informative to start tracking all of the CEP players, where they came from, how they got here and whose money they’re spending.
To quote a VC maxim, “The survivors inherit the market.” It may very well be that those CEP vendors who can last the longest, which could indicate an implicit technical or thought leadership, will win. If the VC’s are indeed waiting to fund additional entrants until someone hits a grand slam, then the hype will eventually have to fade away leaving well run companies with meaningful offerings.
Just my two cents.
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* apologies to cat fans.