Thank You Gartner - Event Processing Conference #1 In the Books
Between September 19th and 21st, Gartner held its first conference on Complex Event Processing and Business Activity Monitoring in Orlando, Florida. Some 200 people (by my estimation) came together to meet others interested in these technologies, as well as see and hear presentations from a range of Gartner analysts, CEP vendors, educators and thought leaders, and most importantly users of CEP. The conference was bookended by impressive presentations from Roy Schulte and Bill Gassman on Day One setting out the current state of the CEP and BAM market, and by Dr David Luckham who closed the conference with a thoughtful and insightful look at the future of CEP.
We’ll blog entries about different aspects of the conference
over the coming days and weeks. But for now it is important to stress how
vital the timing of this conference was and how its attendees have shown that
the principles of CEP are beginning to take hold in a wide array of industries
and solutions. Between the 3 conference tracks organized by Gartner
(Event Processing, Business Activity Monitoring and Event Processing in Banking
and Capital Markets) and the vendor sponsored sessions, we heard descriptions
of applications of CEP in a variety of scenarios ranging from algo trading to
clickstream analysis to content distribution to manufacturing and many more.
Architectural presentations were also prevalent with many
sound ideas being put forward on the relationship between the ever evolving
alphabet soup of CEP, BAM, SOA, EDA, BPM, OLTP, ESB and I am sure, many
others. Bringing together an audience such as this to discuss both
practical implementations and more theoretical research allows insight to
flow around the CEP community and to understand the ramifications for when CEP
is seen as more than just event feeds and event processing speeds.
For true application infrastructures to be built on the principles and
technologies of CEP, a wide understanding of how we can evolve the
relationships between these disciplines will be key. And that
understanding will come from the continued holding of conferences such as this
one (already looking forward to next year in
New York) and interplay between the many
disciplines, vendors and consumers of these technologies.
Dr Luckham posited that CEP will become a ubiquitous
infrastructure technology in some 30 years. For that to be true -
indeed for it to happen sooner - we all have a lot of work to put in … but you
can be sure that it will be worth it.
