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Event ProcessingProduct Type: Market Research ReportPublished by: Bloor Research Published: November 2006 Product Code: R3467-2 Description This report aims to make sense of the event
processing market: looking not just at the
technology and the suppliers thereof but also
the potential uses of event processing. In
addition to vendor/product profiles there are
also discussions of a number of use cases as
well as a more detailed consideration of the
technology. Further, it is our belief that event
processing will become ubiquitous in large
organisations over the next few years and this
report also discusses why we believe this to
be the case and how we expect the market to
develop. However, before we consider any of that: what is event processing and why is it important to your business? While we will discuss what event processing is in more detail later, suffice it to say for now that it is a method of analysing business events in real-time so that you can act on them now. As such, this technology is appropriate whenever extremely rapid response to events is required and applies to a wide variety of circumstances including customer interaction in call centres, fraud detection and prevention (not just detection), buy and sell-side trading in capital markets, retail and supply chain optimisation, battlefield search and rescue, telecommunications, utility and transportation networks and logistics, and a variety of others. In practice there are two types of event processing product. The first type aims only to reduce data latency and insight latency and these are typically referred to as providing real-time operational BI (business intelligence) or, sometimes, simply operational intelligence. The second type of product aims to reduce decision latency as well. For example, in a credit card fraud system you do not want to wait until a human operator makes a decision as to whether this pattern of activity matches a fraudulent pattern—you want the software to recognise that fact and prevent the transaction from taking place. In other words, the decision making process itself is automated. Hybrids are also possible: for example, in capital markets, an event processing system may recommend a trade and the trader simply accepts the recommendation or not. We can refer to this second type of product as an event processing platform. However, even here there is a distinction to be made in that some vendors have focused on very high performance environments where throughput requirements are very demanding, notably in capital markets where the number of events (stock ticks or similar) per second are typically of the order of hundreds of thousands per second. On the other hand there are also suppliers that do not target this market but which would be suitable for any sector other than capital markets. For the purposes of this report we have therefore segmented the vendors into three groups: high performance, general purpose and operational BI. Note that the first three of these is a superset of the next, so that high performance products should be able to do whatever you can do with general purpose or operational BI products and, similarly, general purpose products should be capable of supporting operational BI. That said the operational BI products in this report often have additional features built into them that make them superior for relevant tasks. The following buying criteria have been evaluated for the 18 suppliers in this report: stability and risk, ease of use (including implementation), fitness for purpose, scalability and performance, architecture, support and (geographic) coverage, and value for money. The awards are in 3 categories: Platinum Award (though none of these have been awarded), Gold Award and One to Watch. Note that ‘One to Watch’ means exactly what it says: a product that shows potential but is not yet the finished article. In addition, a number of vendors have specific point solutions that are suitable for use in particular application areas. In general, we are not in a position to compare relevant point products as this is a report about event processing platforms rather than applications. So we have not compared, for example, the various specific applications that are available from the likes of AleriLabs, GemStone, Kaskad and so on for capital markets. However, there are sectors where there are packaged solutions that have no direct competition and we feel able to highlight the companies concerned (SAS and Microsoft) for this reason. Several points should be made about these awards. First, all of these vendors (with the exception of specific awardees) address multiple markets with their products. Secondly, there are very few, if any, weak products within this sector so all, or almost all, of the products and vendors discussed in this report are worth serious consideration. Thirdly, note that while you could (and there are users that do) use, say, Progress for general purpose environments, and while you could use AptSoft or TIBCO (or, indeed, Progress) for operational BI, we have not considered products in one category for awards in another because you will typically be paying for facilities that you do not need: if you have a requirement to process 1,200 transactions per second you do not need to pay (and this affects the value for money consideration) extra for a product that performs 100 times faster. Similarly, if you need a BI product you do not need the extra complexity and costs associated with a product designed to help you build event streaming applications. Finally, the objective here is to provide a ‘snapshot’ of a fast moving market—this snapshot being early October 2006. Fundamentally, we have explored how generally available product sets and the companies themselves perform against our selection criteria as of early October 2006. This is no guide to future performance, although it should not be difficult to draw some of your own conclusions from this report. Table of Contents
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