Review of Gartner's Inaugural EP Summit
Jeff Wootton, VP Product Strategy, Aleri
The first annual Gartner Event Processing Summit was held in September, representing a turning point in the evolution of Event Processing – a coming of age if you will. CEP is now starting to make it into the mainstream, and while awareness and adoption are still a small fraction of what it will become, it’s clear that there is now a critical mass that is gathering steam. Over 200 people made the trip to Florida to spend 3 days learning about and sharing ideas about Event Processing, the current state of the technology and where it's headed. Aleri was proud to be a Platinum sponsor of this new event.
The opening address was given by Roy Schulte, the primary Gartner analyst covering Event Processing. A few of the notable points Roy made in his opening address:
- "Lack of awareness is the biggest impediment to adoption"
- Today, only 2% of applications that do event processing use commercial off-the-shelf event processing software. By 2012 that will rise to 27%.
- The use of commercial off-the-shelf EP platforms will be primarily for high end (high throughput and/or latency sensitive) applications, but a significant % of applications that don't require high end performance will adopt the same platforms for convenience
- Event Driven Architecture is a natural variation of SOA, and EDA should be implemented following SOA principles and standards
Mary Knox, the Gartner analyst who covers financial services, opened her session by stating that "Event Processing is not an option"…observing that it is becoming necessary in order to stay competitive.
The conference was divided into 3 tracks: Event Processing, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and Event Processing in the Capital Markets. While BAM has been around longer than EP as a category of commercial software tools, there is general agreement that BAM is one example of EP application, and that most BAM tools are moving toward incorporating more sophisticated EP capabilities.
Don DeLoach, Aleri’s CEO, gave a well received presentation on “What to look for in CEP Technology”. Don talked about the different approaches to CEP and the challenges in comparing products that actually may be very different. He also touched on the importance of looking at aspects beyond the technology including choosing a vendor that can provide the support and responsiveness that you need.
Current users of EP technology presented a number of case studies. Besides the usual examples of trading applications in the capital markets, there were case studies involving click stream analysis of website activity, implementations by the U.S. Army, energy trading, and payment processing. At the Aleri booth in the “Solution Showcase” area of the conference, we had discussions with representatives of a number of diverse firms, both within and outside the capital markets. Some are actively evaluating commercial CEP technology for use in specific projects, others are learning about how they apply this technology in implementing an event driven architecture to enable real-time response to opportunities and threats.
We are confident this event will continue to grow as EP gains momentum. Gartner has tentatively scheduled next year’s EP summit for late August in New York City. Keep you eye on Gartner’s event calendar for more details. We’ll certainly be there.