DEBS 2012 - keynote by Sethu raman

This morning started by some statistics about paper acceptance by Patrick Eugster, the PC chair. It seems that the acceptance rate in the scientific track was lower than previous years.  

The first keynote was given by Sethu Raman, who was until recently the "distinguished engineer" in Microsoft responsible for StreamInsights.    Sethu gave a relatively short talk (with a lot of questions and discussions) entitled "event processing solutions in the enterprise - a waypoint or launchpad". The illustration above is taken from his opening slides, he had such nice illustrations and citations all over.

You can download Sethu's presentation from the DEBS 2012 webpage (the organizers is doing a good job by copying the presentations from the presentation computer and posting it on the website quickly). 

The main message of Sethu is not surprising (as seen from the information management universe):

•  Event processing has a big potential to play in multiple roles -- real-time analytics,  ETL.  distributed query framework 
• It also plays in many different industries and is not a niche play
• There is a major issue is of conception.  There is aggressive messaging of the "analytics" community which drowns the event processing message in some cases,  The analytics community claim that they can solve all problems of the universe by database centered way, and that event processing is required only for small niche of very low latency requirements that cannot be satisfied by DBMS technology.
• The reality is that the value proposition of event processing is not restricted to the low latency, it is actually reducing the high cost of developing applications - however this message is not heard in a clear enough voice, relative to the other aggressive voices.
• The term "complex event processing" is a confusing term,

I have discussed it with Sethu in the break,  I actually agree to all the assertions.  The over-hype of analytics, and the messaging that comes sometimes from the analytics people (which is not really backed up by technical facts) makes the impression that analytics subsume the functionality that is proposed by event processing.   I am not sure how ling the over-hype of analytics will continue (I think this is quite high in the hype-cycle and will get to the disillusionment phase, since it is indeed over-hyped),  but the messaging of the event processing community about its ROI as complementary and sometimes contrasting to analytics should be cleared heard.   How? -- this is part of the discussion about the EPTS online magazine.

More - later