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...

Some footnotes to Brenda Michelson's post on TUCON

Las Vegas is a place where companies like to do customer conferences; I guess that the quantity and sizes of hotels is a major factor. Last week IBM has done the big customer conference: IMPACT 2010, after a few years of attending this conference, I have skipped this one, so I did not cover it in the Blog. This week TIBCO has done its customer conference - TUCON 2010, naturally I have not been there either, as I am not a TIBCO user, but looked at some impressions on the Blogland, and came across Brenda Michelson's Blog describing the keynote sessions. With the disclaimer that my information on this is second hand (but a good hand !), I'll make some footnotes:

1. I believe in the direction that events will be more and more in the center of enterprise (and other applications); we see it happening and we'll see much more.

2. Like Brenda, I am not sure that the phrase "enterprise 3.0" will catch, at the past there was an attempt to push "SOA 2.0" but it did not catch either, I think the world became tired from recycling the n.0 phrase.

3. "2 second advantage" is catchy, and may be true for some applications, but in some of them 2 second might not be enough to make a difference. In general there are two aspects: immediate reaction -- react fast (or faster than others); and proactive --- react in time to mitigate or eliminate future event; I am not sure it that if the Interpol will know about a crime 2 seconds earlier it will be enough time to eliminate the crime.

4. About NoSQL and relations to event processing - I'll write a separate post, it is an interesting insight that NoSQL is gaining traction.

5. Context as additional dimension -- I have written several times in the past about contexts, and am planned to deliver a tutorial about contexts in DEBS 2010; I believe that contexts are starting to be a major factor in computing.

It is good to see that the event-centric universe is getting more traction. More -later.