As an skeptic person, I have never really believed in astrology, but reading it from time to time, and somehow there is some correlation between years in which I had major changed in life, to years in which the astrology has predicted it, but this is not a scientific evidence, of course.Anyway, the current prediction about this year came from Mark Palmer, the dynamic CEO of Streambase, who made nine predictions. Of course, his predictions were made from the viewpoint of his current role, but I thought that there is some value to review it. I'll say a few comments on them, one by one.
Prediction #1: 100+ Event Processing Applications Per Firm Milestone will be Passed.
This is something that I would like to see, and if will happen it will show that event processing is really part of the main stream computing. Personally I don't know any organization that is even close to 100+ applications, but I guess that Mark has somebody in mind. It will be even more interesting, if the 100+ applications will not be just thousand islands, but will also be connected, use heterogeneous event processing platforms...
Prediction #2: The "Deluge of Real-Time Data" Will Not Drive Event Processing Adoption
A refreshing view when it comes from Streambase which in the past over-hyped the mythical "event per second",
I totally agree, the main value of event processing seems to be the agility and reduction of total cost of ownership.
Prediction #3: Cognitive Physics Will Be as Important as Computing Physics
This is a challenging one, I was not familiar with the term cognitive physics, but with the help of all mighty Google, I found something about it on the Web. Anyway, Mark means that the way we communicate with computerized systems should align better with the way we think, getting to higher level abstractions, and consequently again to agility to implement new stuff. I totally agree that higher level languages is one of the most important directions for event processing, as a matter of fact, this is one of my major interest areas.
Prediction #4: Quantitative Thinking will Trump Traditional Thinking
This again has to do with higher level way to express quantitative thinking. Event processing is just one of various techniques to express quantitative thinking, the rest are - business rules and various analytics. Decision platforms will be combined of all. Event processing is certainly a player here, but not the only one.
Prediction #5: Software Stacks will Continue to Miss the Mark
There are systems in which event processing can be stand-alone island, but in many cases the producers and consumers for the events are coming from applications that have already been developed using the software stacks, thus, there will be a benefit to have good integration of event processing with these software stacks. As mark said customers are interested in solution to their business needs and not in technology, in some of the event processing systems I've seen, the main investment was not in the event processing system itself, but in its connectivity with the various producers and consumers. I agree that it is not cost-effective to buy an entire stack only to use event processing, but the same organizations that will have 100+ applications of event processing (prediction #1) are also those who already have BPM/messaging/application servers and other type of middleware and they are looking for good integration story, so this is not a black-or-white situation.
Prediction #6: A New Event-Based Software Stack will Emerge
The main claim here is that alternative stacks will emerge as combination of innovative technologies that comes from small companies. I've heard this idea before, in order to make it happen, more interoperability standards are needed, since the different parts of the stack need to talk to one another. I guess these standards will come, but from my limited experience, standards is a slow world.
Prediction #7: Stream-Based Platforms will Continue to Lead a Siege Against the $15B Data-Base Market
I am not sure what is the meaning of stream-based platforms, since the first predictions were made about event processing, and the body of this prediction also talks about event processing. Anyway, I agree that event processing is positioned as complementary to the business intelligence and general DBMS market. Analysts also claim that BI tools will have event processing capabilities (another software stack!), but still have some way to go until becoming main-stream there.
Prediction #8: Open Source CEP Won't Impact the Market, But Open Source Will
This is probably true for 2010, but might not be true for the longer future. When the event processing area will mature more and have its own standards, the event processing instance of MySQL may emerge.
Prediction #9: Event processing will Yield a Great New Software Powerhouse
Sometimes the emergence of new market can grow a software vendor from start-up to a medium or large software vendor, this has happened before, it might happen again - if indeed event processing will become a multi-billion business, I guess that part of it will be done by the current super powers in the software world, but some can go to growing companies. This will probably not happen in 2010, but I wish Mark success in his aspirations. Thinking big is a good practice, and a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.
No comments:
Post a Comment