CEP consolidation continues

It’s been another remarkable week. I told my wife there would be a lot of traveling for me in the first part of the year and I was right. Last week was New Jersey and New York. This week was Dallas Fort Worth and Silicon Valley. I’ve been visiting key customers, journalists and analysts.

This week has also seen further consolidation in the CEP market. I have been predicting that there could not be a stand-alone CEP market and that CEP will either find a home in applications, databases, stacks or business application platforms.  In this case Sybase has snapped up Aleri to extend its database business into the CEP domain, as well as solutions in the risk space. Aleri are a good company with good people and good products. They come from the “in memory database” perspective but developed a high performing CEP engine and learned lessons from real customers that a SQL approach is not adequate to address real applications, and embedded actions statements are need within a CEP language. Also they learned that the best way to sell CEP is not as a technology but as solutions.

I think Sybase have made a smart move – for probably a bargain price – judging by the release that says they acquire the assets only. I wish my friends at Aleri all the best for the future.