Getting serious about event processing
September 23, 2008
I was interested to read Paul Vincent’s analysis of the release of TIBCO BusinessEvents 3.0. Based on all of the recent press (and press-releases-disguised-as-reporting) about this release, TIBCO is definitely putting more marketing muscle into this product.
In his post, Paul talks about BE as a platform that combines many techniques for procssing events (inference rules, state management and continuous queries). He also discusses both distributed processing and decision management as features of a CEP product. And TIBCO seems to have a continued focus on simplified modelling of event processing, for use by less technical users. I have not looked at BE in a very long time, so I could not say how well all of it works. But you have to give them credit for the completeness of their vision.
Now we see direct competition between IBM and TIBCO in event processing. Their most recent or upcoming EP products seem to focus on similar features, but they will take different approaches. On one hand, we have TIBCO BusinessEvents, which has really evolved based in large part on a (relatively) big customer base. On the other hand, we have IBM, which has put some of their significant research muscle into this area and is looking to jump ahead with some upcoming product releases.
Looks like the big boys are finally getting serious about event processing.
September 23, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Hi Hans – thanks for the analysis. A few thoughts if I may:
“TIBCO seems to have a continued focus on simplified modelling of event processing” == actually we see 2 levels, technical and business; the Decision Manager is the Business User Interface, but rules / rule fns / states / queries can all be IT-defined.
“Now we see direct competition…” == actually we haven’t seen much direct competition yet from the “big guys”, just a marketing machine focus (and references to use cases that appear remarkably similar to published TIBCO customer success stories
). Probably the big guys are going after their own customer base first, to try and get some initial references.
But we agree, competition is good, and investing in marketing (and no doubt product too) will raise awareness for the entire industry.
Cheers
September 24, 2008 at 10:00 am
It occurs to me that it’s got to be gratifying to see your product and vision becoming successful to the point where a big player has decided to compete. Not to mention the fact that you folks built a product basically from an idea to become a leader and a source of growth. I know personally how hard it is to pull something like that together, so I think you guys really deserve a lot of credit.
Honestly, I’m a little surprised by IBM’s strategy so far, and as you say it is not proven but only marketing. Since BE has so clearly demonstrated the application of inference rules to this market, I expected IBM to leverage ILOG immediately. When I saw that they had both AptSoft and ILOG, I was expecting a killer combination. Now that they have announced their first generation product using only the AptSoft model, as with many people, I am skeptical about whether they really “get it”. Maybe you can tell that I’m not very enthusiastic about the WebSphere CEP product right now.
But whether or not you’re currently seeing IBM crop up in sales calls, they do have all the pieces within their organization to develop a very serious competing product. And that’s what I mean by “IBM is competing”. We will now see whether they can pull it all together into a good product.