Cyberstrategics

I was pleasantly surprised when I read Seth Grime’s Complex Event Processing as a Marketing Device. Normally when I read CEP-related posts by Seth I tend to grimace more than just a bit, as Seth tends to write about event stream processing people (the “SQL-ish continuous query folks”) and products versus the large vision of event processing or the challenges of actually doing complex event processing.  There may be some commerical influences, as I believe Seth recently authored, or coauthored, a marketing paper for Coral8.

Today I read some interesting opinions from Seth (Edit: via Hans Gilde) that were more objective that some of his prior “I drank the Kool-Aid!” posts on stream processing; and I am quoting below.

The market for the brand CEP was always destined to be disappointing. How many of these buzzword techno-brands have ever worked out well? They are the things that go through hype cycles, are discussed by analysts and are often believed to be very “strategic.” And we all know that 80% of that stuff is either total BS or exaggerated for career promotion. From a finance perspective, we are also very aware of how to exploit and then abandon the fad built around such a buzzword. The capital market has gone through an upswing in capital for fad CEP, and now will experience a the abandonment phase. Which will be compounded by the overall capital market problems (duh).

I completely agree with this and am very happy to see others are starting to be “truth speakers” versus channels for the overhyped marketing we have seen for quite some time.  Honestly (and sadly),  I was beginning to wonder if  “software marketing” and “fraud” were synonyms!

Seth (Edit: actually Hans Gilde) also opined:

Over the next couple of years this market can support maybe three big vendors, one small vendor and maybe a profitable but small operation founded around a fundamentally OSS offering. This leaves about 20 small vendors and one or two big ones out of luck. And considering the fragmentation, I think it’s unlikely for a vendor that is now still small to become big. All that’s left is the knife fight among the small vendors for that one surviving spot and the slow attrition that will cause one or two big players to abandon their product line.

This is true only if these vendors do not evolve beyond continous query, stream processing engines (streams, feeds and speeds), and there has been no indication that they will evolve.   The problem is that we don’t really have any CEP vendors calling themselves “CEP vendors”.  (Hint: All the folks doing CEP are actually writing code and solving complex problems; and none of these companies are selling continous query, stream processing engines.  They are working hard to to solve complex problems with the appropriate complex analytics and algorithims.)

Seth (Edit: actually Hans Gilde) concludes:

There never was a “real CEP” approach, just a of “CEP brand” approaches.

Actually, there was first an “ESP brand of approaches” and, at least, folks were truth tellers and not claiming to be CEP experts.  However, for some strange reason, when we informed everyone that ESP was a useful, but incomplete subset of CEP, the same ESP vendors seemed to take offense “to being a part of the solution”, and they had to be “the whole solution”.   This was a big mistake for CEP and it has been the marketing guys who have dug the grave they are starting to see (a glimpse of).

As Abraham Lincoln said,

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

When the evangelists and marketing folks started to say that a complex event is simply an abstraction of two or more events, any abstract, the writing was on the wall…..

You cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

---

Edited: Seth Grimes was quoting Hans Gilde, said Marc Adler. Thanks Marc!

Filed under: Analytics, CEP News and Events, Complex Event Processing, Coral8, Event Processing, Event Stream Processing