Sunday, July 29, 2012

Event processing in practice


My old friend Roy Schulte from Gartner, who has been the first analyst that published analyst reports about event processing, and one of the founding fathers of the event processing community and EPTS has published a "personal blog" on the complexevents site with the provocative title:  " does anybody care about event processing?".   Roy expresses his opinion (that I've heard from him several times before) about the event processing concept and market. Roy's short answer to the question he asks is YES, but many of those who are doing event processing are not aware that they are doing event processing.   He mentions two main issues:
  • Terminology:  the term event is manifested in many different ways, while the community centered around the current products have narrow interpretation
  • Market:  Most of the event processing is custom code, or built into vertical products, and not the general purpose event processing platforms, thus he had to scale down his prediction for revenue that count the event processing platform market.
Roy suggests that EPTS will decouple itself from the focus on the product oriented functionality and concentrate on event processing as technology in the broad sense.   

I concur with Roy's observations (we have discussed it last year when I visited him in the Gartner office);  I have written before about the build-buy trade-off,  based on chapter 1 in the event processing manifesto, a chapter that Roy was one of its authors.      I also noted in some of the feedback to my book that I got from developers who told me that the book helped them a lot in architectural thinking and clarity of concepts, but they also said that they'll continue to develop event processing applications in custom code.  

Roy's Blog has been written in the context of the discussions on EPTS and online magazine,  and I have expressed my opinion in the same spirit as Roy --  the online magazine (and EPTS) should appeal to anybody that are doing anything with any kind of event in any form.  This should capture all the "event processing in practice" in the universe.  More news about the online magazine -- soon (the editorial board is now being created, which contains both old members of the community and new blood of practitioners).




1 comment:

Unknown said...

thanks for the event processing manifesto, very well documented and informative.Event Proposals