Cyberstrategics

In Streambase Again!!!!  Arghhhhh!, Marc Adler concludes,

“This is why organizations like STAC Research are so important to our industry.”

STAC has publicly stated that the stream processing engines they evaluate should not be called “complex event processing” platforms.  STAC refers to these this class of software as “event processing platforms” (EPP).

“EPP is a fairly new product category, and customers are eager to understand how specific products behave under specific workloads,” said Peter Lankford, founder and director of STAC.”

This is the correct classification, for reasons I have mentioned numerous times.  CEP is a real-time etection-oriented technology or concept.   EPPs denotes a general class of software that is not specific to real-time detection and can cover other event processing areas, for example, smart order routing, order management, and simple risk scoring mechanisms that do not utilitize the complexities of detection theory.

I advise the many groups (users and vendors) working routing, order management and simple risk management applications in event processing to follow STAC’s lead and correctly classify their software as EPPs.

It actually does the state-of-the-art of complex event processing more harm than good by misclassifying platforms that are not detection-oriented as CEP platforms, when technically speaking, the these platforums are event processing platforms.

Help stop the incorrect marketing hype and follow STAC.  Calling these stream processing platforms “EPP” aligns with STAC, which is appropriate, especially given the weight FSI industry experts like Marc of Citi place on STAC.

Peter Lankford, posted a well written, detailed comment on The CEP Blog, stating the following:

STAC believes that what distinguishes these new products from their predecessors is that they are open containers in which customers can plug their own business logic to process event-driven data. That is, they are platforms. We therefore prefer the term “Event Processing Platform” (EPP). This term applies irrespective of the complexity or simplicity of the use to which a given product is put.

I could not agree more.

Filed under: CEP News and Events, CEP Terminology, Complex Event Processing, Cyber-Trading Technologies