SAP acquired Sybase: the event processing angle

It seems that Paul Vincent will have to update his product genealogy again. There are various analysts like James Kobielus or Philip Howard have expressed their opinion about the motivation and possible implications of this merge, and I leave this discussion to them; I'll write on the narrow perspective of the event processing angle (to justify the name of this Blog).

Taking the EP perspective, there is a series of big fish swallows smaller fish, until it gets to the ultimate big fish. Event processing is shifting from being dominant by start-ups to be dominant by bigger companies, which happened before in other areas, and is sign of getting this technology to the main stream of computing, this is consistent with some of the trends we identified as the current trends in the conclusion chapter of the EPIA book, event processing is going from narrow domains to wider domains and from being stand-alone technology to being part of bigger frameworks. As four big fish -- now the four big software companies - IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are all in the EP market, and all of them view EP as part of a bigger game; I guess that there will always be smaller stand-alone EP companies for niche markets, but most applications do not live in an isolation and have some relations to other areas - BPM, BRMS, BI and some more.

The fact that most players in this market are big and medium (TIBCO, Progress Software, Software AG) companies, can make the climate more comfortable to advance standards now -- which is one of the topics we plan to discuss in Dagstuhl next week.

When we established EPTS, SAP was not interested to join, since they did not have a product at that time, we'll see whether they will want to inherit Sybase's membership (which by itself was recently inherited from Aleri)... We'll stay tuned for more on this front...