Gartner hype cycle July 2014

Gartner published its hype cycle report recently.   The "Internet of Things" is now at the top of the hype cycle, defined as "peak of inflated expectation".   "Big Data" which has been there before, and now moved down the line of disillusionment.   Another hype in the height is the "natural language question answering" that was hyped by IBM's Watson.   In the upwords side we can see among other things: software-defined anything, connected home, and prescriptive analytics.    Note that in the right-hand side there are technologies which are considered mature, such as: speech recognition, enterprise 3D printings and in-memory analytics.  "Complex event processing" is moving slowly down the disillusionment path. 

Gartner's Hype cycle on emerging technologies 2013

Hype cycles time of the year, and Gartner published the emerging technologies hype cycle for 2013. 

Some insights: 

1.  "Complex Event Processing" is still near the peak of inflated  expectations, actually moved a little bit below the peak.  This means that it started the process of filtering out the hype, and getting to realistic contributions.
2. On the analytics front -- predictive analytics is now at the plateau of productivity, and on its way to being a commodity, while prescriptive analytics is on the rise, but still in the innovation phase.
3. Human augmentation, brain-computer interface, quantum computing and mobile robots are on the rise.  In fact, the Gartner's press release emphasizes the human - machine relationships.
4. In adjacent technologies to event processing; Internet of Things is getting closer to the peak, In memory DB and context analytics are also getting past the hype peak. 
5. Big data is still in the height of the hype --- as we saw in other sources,  it is now recognized as a catch-all hype, and I guess that it spawn several distinct concepts in the future.
6.   Mobile phones/tablets etc are not mentioned explicitly as part of the emerging technologies, I guess that mobile by itself is not a technology -- it has influence on all other technologies (the same as the WEB is not a technology).

The big data hype cycle 2012

I haven't written in the last few days,  I have been in EU project review (as a reviewer) in Brussels and also had some time to be tourist, and climbed the Atomium, Brussels known icon

and  in several museums in center city, taking refuge from the rain 

  including the famous Magritte museum.   I have imported some Belgian chocolate (most of it was already given away)  and a Belgian virus, with whom I am struggling in the last couple of days.

I also came across the Gartner's big data hype cycle for 2012 -- the first time in which Gartner chose to look at big data as an area.

You may notice that "complex event processing" is around the peak of the diagram.

It seems that this hype cycle made Irfan Khan, CTO of Sybase quite furious, his firm reaction was:

"Gartner dead wrong about Big Data life-cycle".    Khan claims that Big Data is not a hype but a reality, and expectations are under-inflated not over-inflated since it can do much more than what people assume.

I guess that there is growing adoption to technologies associated with Big Data, but I don't think that it reached the plateau of productivity, as Khan's claims,  since this is not around whether there are mature products (by the vendors' conception), but around the utilization in industry, and it is difficult to say that most organizations had good exploitation of such technologies.  Furthermore, Khan's claim that Big Data is under-inflated actually shows that the plateau of productivity has been reached.   

In any event,  the event processing angle is interesting.  Note that originally event processing appeared in the hype cycle of enterprise architecture for several years.  In 2012 event processing does not appear explicitly, 

Big Data appears as one block in the top.  This shows that event processing has migrated (at least in Gartner's mind) from the middleware world into the analytics world,  and this is also compatible  with some of the current trends, but this should be a subject of another posting - coming soon. 

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 

Getting closer to the peak of inflated excpectations

The Gartner hype cycle has a notion called "peak of inflated expectations", which states that different technologies go up in the hype ladder until getting to the peak, where people think that can solve much of the universe's problems, and then, somehow people realize that this is not the case and go through frustration and disillusionment, until realizing the true value (if any !), and getting back on track, now with the right set of expectations. Two recent Blog postings show some indication that we are getting closer when talking about event processing:

• Carol-Ann Matignon from Fair Issac complains in her Blog that some people say that event processing = decision management and brings some counter examples where there are decision management applications that use batch processing.
• Paul Vincent from TIBCO wonders whether CEP = continuous analytics.
  

Actually, both are right. Event processing may have a role in decision management, there are some applications of decision management that are pure event processing, some in which event processing has some role, but not doing the entire trick, and some that are really batch oriented data management. Likewise continuous analytics can be done in response to event (raw or derived) or just periodically. Event processing may or may not have a role in deciding when to do this analytics (e.g. optimize the traffic light setting), the optimization itself is typically not event processing per se.

I think that it is very good to observe that event processing can play a role in many areas, likewise, it is also good to be clear about its possible role, and which are the cases in which it has value, and which are the cases it hasn't, I guess that we'll have to wait for the enlightenment phase, in the hype cycle terminology until there will be more universal clarity about the role and value of event processing. More - Later.

On the Gartner 2009 application architecture hype cycle

Here is a revised version of my Blog entry that relates to the Gartner Application architecture hype cycle report (Gartner Report ID number G00168300 from July 16,2009) , the revision was done at the request of Gartner who asked that I'll make exact citations in their report, and make clear distinction between what is quoted from the Gartner report, and my own remarks.

Here are a collection of citations from the report that are of interest from the Event Processing perspective:

1. "Event-driven architecture (EDA) is an architectural style in which a component (or several components) in a software system executes in response to receiving one or more event notifications". In the report EDA is positioned under the hype cycle phase "Climbing the slope of enlightenment" which according to Gartner's terminology is defined as " Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of organizations lead to a true understanding of the technology's applicability, risks and benefits. Commercial off-the-shelf methodologies and tools ease the development process"
2. CEP is positioned under the hype cycle phase of "Technology Trigger" which according to Gartner's terminology is defined as "A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant press and industry interest", and is the phase that precedes the "peak of inflated expectations" phase.
3. For CEP: "market penetration is 1% to 5% of target audience"
4. CEP use is expected to grow at approximately 25% per year from 2009 to 2014, but the use of COTS CEP products is expected to grow more than 40% per year in this time frame
5. For CEP COTS products: " Most of these products are immature and incomplete"
6. "Most business analysts do not know how to identify business situations that could be addressed through CEP, and that is limiting the rate at which CEP use can expand. Most software engineers are not familiar with CEP development"
7. "The Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) was launched in June 2008, and it is expected to facilitate the adoption of CEP".
   

Here are my own comments:

• Note that EDA and CEP are positioned in different phases of the hype cycle.
• The fact that the market penetration is low indicates that there is still a substantial growth potential, if we can overcome the adoption challenges
• The adoption challenges consist of product maturity and market awareness. We are now still in the first generation of products in this area and maturity is typically achieved in later generation. Awareness and understanding of value and positioning are indeed a challenge.
• EPTS indeed has been formed to facilitate the adoption of the event processing area. Both challenges mentioned here – advancing the state of the art to accelerate the next generations, and educate the general community about the value and positioning of event processing within the enterprise computing.
  

More on DEBS 2009

I am still in the DEBS conference venue, in a time gap between the conference sessions and the conference dinner that will be held here in an hour or so. This is the time to provide some more comments about DEBS 2009. The conference will continue tomorrow, but I'll skip the last day, going to NY for some IBM meetings. Spending whole three days in a conference is a heavy toll on my busy schedule, but it is fun. The next conference will be held in Cambridge, UK, and the call for papers (above) has been distributed. Today Alex Buchmann gave the second keynote address about some event processing applications and research challenges, I hope that Alex will make his slides available to the public. Also today there have been sessions of demos and posters, mostly by Ph.D. students, mostly concentrate on the transport area, pub/sub, messaging etc... We need more Ph.D. students on the event processing topics. Next there has been a fast abstract session that present work in progress in 10 minutes. I have presented a work in progress on spatial aspects of event processing, and will write more in the future about this activity.


Back to yesterday, the industry track was divided into two parts: industrial reports and a panel. In the industrial reports there was one, presented by Florian Springer, that the audience will remember for long time, not so much because the content of the talk, but since Florian made a point about importance of standards, by showing real-life examples for standards, and the example he chose was condoms, which, according to Florian, have a standard - they are all in the same size. People kept talking about it.

I have moderated the panel about academia/industry relations in event processing, and posed the following questions (see slide below)



The first question was, whether the academia should work on incremental stuff related to current technology, or on disruptive technologies, making current technologies obsolete, which was translated to the question --- do we want to clone John Bates to develop new technologies that will make the technology created by the original John Bates as obsolete. John Bates, who was in the audience, reacted by saying that his wife will not like the idea of cloning him, since she thinks that one of this type is more than enough. The panelists were two persons from academia, and two from industry. One of the industrial people was Richard Tibbetts, Streambase CTO, who showed the famous Gartner hype-cycle picture, claiming that the event processing area is already approaching the plateau. I think that he is a bit optimistic, in my opinion, we are not even at the peak of inflated expectations...

There was also some discussion about teaching event processing courses, and the fact that today it takes a lot of time to get a university graduate being effective in developing event processing applications, since they need to be taught to think in a different way. There have been some more talks, but I am tired from writing, so that's all for now.... Tomorrow early morning -- flying to NYC.