Yesterday, I spent much of the evening in Nofim elementary school, my youngest daughter Daphna, is graduating from elementary school, and they have done their grand celebration, with a lot of speeches, and performance of the children in signing, dancing and playing. It was nice, but somewhat long (the speeches part), and they have done it outside in the hottest day of the year (so far). 
Another experience is that I needed to replace the door lock cylinder in my former apartment, since she is going to rent it now. I know that the Americans tend to do everything (including oil change in cars) by themselves, when I joined IBM, I was surprised to discover that I am now a "technical person", actually my current IBM title is - IBM Senior Technical Staff Member; I have never thought about software development as a technical activity, in my mind, a technical person is a person that knows how to hold a screwdriver properly, a skill I never possessed, so I looked at the Internet and called a person whose profession is to do that, we set a meeting at 6PM, and I went out in the middle of a meeting to go there, at 6:10PM I called him, he said: the person is on his way, will be there within 10-15 minutes, I waited until 6:30, and my patient started to run out, I called again -- the answer: he is almost there, give him couple of minutes. I called again in 6:40, got the same answer. My last call was in 6:48, saying -- I am cancelling this order, and will try to find another one that when he says 6:00 he really means it. Today I called another guy from the Internet, and again set a meeting with him at 6:00PM, this time I called him before leaving home, and he said -- I'll be there in 30 minutes, and indeed, he was there 25 minutes later, and changed the lock. I told him that I am happy to see that there are some professional people who arrive on time, and he said that he as also a customer hates service people who are late... I always thought on punctuality as a value, unfortunately, I am (almost) the only one in my family who has a sense of time.
Anyway, I got today some spreadsheet that an analyst made to evaluate various event processing products, the good thing is that people are trying to devise such criteria, however, looking at the criteria there, my observation is that the people devised this list came with a long laundry list of criteria, many of them seem to me irrelevant for many of the applications I know, while others that I would imagine that will be there, are left out, or treated in a shallow way. This gets me back to the difficulty of devising performance benchmarks in this area.
My observation is that the event processing area is not monolithic; people are using event processing for different reasons, and have different functional and non-functional requirements and priorities. Trying to think in a monolithic way, may yield a result that is not valid for anybody. I think that there should be deeper research in this area and provide criteria for classes of applications; this classification is not easy, as the diversity of applications that each individual organization or vendor has, is limited. This is one of the things that require a community effort, and I hope that the EPTS use case working group will be able to provide it, so I am looking forward to hear their tutorial in DEBS 2009. This also relates to our goal of establishing event processing manifesto, which will be the main theme of the event processing Dagstuhl seminar in May 2010. Stay tuned for more.
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