On the "Return on Investment" in Event Processing

As part of the orders that I got from my physician, to which I am humbly comply, is to spend around one hour walking every day, if I have time I am doing it outside, if not I am doing it at home on an electric walker. Yesterday I walked around, not far from home, and decided to take a shortcut via a woodland, not far from home, but not a familiar one, I saw a trail that seemed to go up in the hill, where the top of the hill was supposed to lead me back to somewhere in my neighborhood, there was a split in the trail and I chose a random one, and after five minutes realized that it leads to a dead end, however, I did not feel like going down, so I continued to climb up and pave the way among bushes, fallen trees etc -- quite irresponsible of me, especially as it was getting dark outside -- after 40 minutes of wondering I saw the back yard of an house, navigated there, and got safe and sound indeed to somewhere in the neighborhood. Somehow felt as return to childhood -- but not for long.

Anyway, today I would like to write something about the "Return on Investment" in event processing.


Mark Palmer, the current CEO of Streambase, has recently blogged about the fact that CEP is not about "feeds and speed" but about "ease of use", it is actually refreshing to see it from a Streambase person, since in the past some Streambase people claimed that the only reason to use a CEP engine is due to its scalability properties. Actually I have written one of my first postings on this Blog, entitled "the mythical event per second" saying something about it. I agree that there are some applications that require to satisfy high throughput or any other QOS metrics as a crucial requirement, but this is a secondary ROI type. The major one is providing abstractions that reduces the cost of the development and consequently the maintenance of event-driven applications. This is similar to what the DBMS discipline provides us -- as a grey-bearded old timer who is not completely senile, I still remember the times we have worked with file systems, DBMS provided many abstractions that makes the data oriented applications much easier to develop. The same goes for event processing, I am constantly saying to people who ask -- is there something new in event processing ? the answer is -- not really, event processing were hard-coded within regular programming for ages, however, since traditional programming languages and environments were not created to process events, the manual work required is quite substantial. The reduction in cost relative to hard coding can be substantial, and some customers have estimated it in 75% reduction. It will be interesting to do an empirical study about it, probably a challenge for our EPTS use case work group. More about ROI -- at later posts.