Tuesday, April 7, 2009

"Complex Event Processing poised to growth" in IEEE Computer


IEEE Computer, the flagship magazine of IEEE Computer society, publishes in the April issue an article entitled: "Complex Event Processing poised to growth" by Neal Leavitt, under the section "industry trends". The magazine, which has relatively large distribution, explains the basic concepts and trends of event processing, and cite some of the EPTS steering committee members like active John Morrell from Aleri, Alan Lundberg from TIBCO, David Luckham, Roy Schulte from Gartner and myself. It also cits some other people in the community. EPTS is also mentioned explicitly. The fact that one of the popular professional magazines chose to dedicate and article, indicates a growing interest in the area, and this is just one indication. As I noted before, the February issue of International Journal of Banking Systems, which is a specific industry journal, has published an article on "event horizon". Enjoy !

3 comments:

Hans said...

I really dislike this IEEE article. Do you like it? I think it bad even for the Industry Trends section.

There is a picture of apparently the components of CEP (Figure 1), but no description of, or reference resource for understanding what the various components mean. And of course, the now ubiquitous phrase: "CEP promises to help organizations detect complex patterns in activities and recognize opportunities and threats."

Maybe this is good for a CIO magazine or something, but how could an IEEE reader not wonder how the article can go 3 pages without explaining why CEP is poised for growth or how it purports to accomplish the various promises better than the alternative? After reading this article, won't most people still draw a blank when asked what CEP is? That is Bad! (notice the capital B in Bad!)

Sorry for the long rant.

Opher Etzion said...

Hello Hans. The purpose has not been to endorse the content, but to point out that IEEE Computer magazine found this topic important enough to ask the writer to compile an article.

As for the content --- I guess that under the "industry trends" section, the author looked more at opinions of the trends, than a deeper dive into what it is. Personally I would have preferred a more techincal introductory article.

cheers,

Opher

Hans said...

A more technical article sounds good to me, but I see a different problem.

Thinking about the audience for this article, focusing on people who are real decision makers. So these are people who are inherently skeptical and focused on ROI - not people who want to adopt every fad acronym because it sounds cool.

Someone like this will become immediately skeptical on reading this article. It brings up all the red flags that people have been trained to spot from watching the decades of the "great new software" startup/failure cycle.

There are statements like "You’ll be able to use the technology to turn your business into a proactive, predictive enterprise..." But there is neither information on why it should be able to do this nor success stories on how this has worked in the past. This is exactly like the empty promises from SOA vendors about how it is the magic tonic to turn your IT organization into an agile, money-saving, profit-generating force of nature.

Also, there are statements like “The real impediment to adoption
is a lack of education.” Implying that it would would take off like a rocket, if only more people had heard of it. But again, no direct evidence to make a case for how great this thing really is. The skeptical reader will come to another conclusion about why it has not yet taken off: because it is not as great as the marketers claim.

I have not heard reactions on this particular article, but I have seen so many people react poorly to just this kind of article in the past. I wonder if this kind of press is now doing more harm than good...