Repeat the Term CEP Eleven Times and Click Your Heels

Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Tim Bass

Fellow blogger Marc Adler writes Streambase on the Move? , apparently in agreement with some of the super-marketing hype on CEP. Streambase uses the term “CEP” in a press release 11 (eleven) times — as if you repeat the phrase CEP eleven times you are a true “CEP player”. Maybe this is the marketing theory of “if we say it enough, people will believe it”?

The fact of the matter is that it does not matter how many times streaming event processing vendors use the term “CEP” for order routing, order management, algorithmic trading and similar applications that do involve the use of detection theory, they are not CEP players. CEP is a detection-oriented technology and the core concepts of detection-oriented technologies are well established.

CEP, by definition, is quite easy to understand. CEP is about detecting opportunities and threats (in a network with many seemingly unrelated events) in real-time. The operative word is detection. Detection experts discuss false positives, false negatives, true positives, true negative, type I errors, type II errors and similar detection principles.

In his last post, Streambase Again!!!! Arghhhhh!, Marc asks, “Greg McSweeny from Wall Street and Technology to ask his writer, Penny Crossman, to substantiate what she wrote in her article concerning the competitive evaluation that Phase Capital did between the various CEP products.”

This is all well and good, but why not ask detection experts to substantiate the basic principals of detection theory and police software marketing people who use a detection-oriented term, by definition “CEP”, for non-detection oriented software applications?

The software vendors trying to make a name for themselves in CEP should not take this personally. There is no need for controversy. If you want to discuss this further, please publish your paper(s) that discuss the Type I and Type II errors, false positives, false negatives (etc) in your applications.

Thank you.

Note: … Maybe I simply have missed the boat in my engineering studies. I never realized that repeating the phrase “CEP” over and over again, and clicking our heels, helps us detect complex events!!!!

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