2009 - event processing perspectives

2009 is going away soon, and it is time to summarize it from the event processing perspective, which is the focus of this Blog.

According to analysts this has been a good year for event processing, in tough economic climate, the accumulative market for event processing continued to grow, more or less according to the original predictions, and is expected to continue the substantial growth. Here are ten statements about event processing in 2009.

1. In the vendors world, Microsoft has announced a forthcoming product, Software AG notified that it is working on a product, and more start-ups have joined the area; the most notable acquisition this year is the acquisition of Coral8 by Aleri that was not an intuitive acquisition.
2. In my own company, IBM -- besides Websphere Business Events (WBE) that was launched in 2008 and is growing rapidly in 2009 in number of customers, IBM announced three more products in this area in 2009: Infosphere Streams, Websphere Sensor Events, and EDA extension for CICS, as IBM believes in having event processing capabilities pervasive throughout its software portfolio
3. The emergence of new book. The first book in this area that has made a big impact was David Luckham's "Power of events". Eight year have passed with Luckham's book as a single book in this area. In 2009 several more books have been published, most notable the book by Chandy and Schulte. Some more books are due in 2010
4. Some popular magazines ran articles about event processing, one of them is International Journal of Banking Systems, and the other is IEEE Computer.
5. All major analysts had special reports on event processing. Gartner has written about it before, but now made it explicit part of its "hype cycle"; Forrester made a thorough report with comparison among several products over multiple criteria.
6. The major scientific conference of event processing DEBS has been endorsed by ACM and became ACM DEBS conference. The conference made a shift over the last couple of years from "pub/sub" conference to a larger event processing conference. EPTS provided two tutorials: languages and use cases
7. Other event processing related workshops interacting event processing with other areas were: event-driven business process management, or event-based processing in robotics. These two topics have been discussed in the annual EPTS meeting that was held in Trento.
8. it is announced that Streambase will receive the "world economic foundation" award, an indication that event processing is considered as one of the influential technologies for the world economy.
9. Another winner of the same award is Twitter. This year different applications that processing Twitter events have emerged.
10. The quote of the year comes from Alex Buchmann, in his Keynote address in DEBS 2010: regular programming is like drinking with a straw, this is good when the data is standing, while the data is moving, like in event processing, using the same kind of thinking is similar to use a straw to drink from a waterfall.

Something about what's coming in 2010 -- later.