IBM, Business Event Processing, and CEP: behind the bag of spanners
Earlier this week I attended an IBM press and analyst summit on the topic of "Business Event Processing". To coincide with this, the company made some
announcements on its "BEP leadership", with over 3700 "BEP customers". This is fairly early days in IBM's attempts to tell a coherent story about what it's doing in event processing, although it's been helping customers for many years prior to the January 2008
acquisition of AptSoft (which catalysed IBM's use of the BEP term). However the company isn't doing itself any favours with language like this: it's all too easy for it to come across as disingenuous, or at the very least the result of a significant amount of Vaseline being spread on a camera lens.
Why? Well, it's a question of boundaries and definitions. Specifically, IBM defines BEP in the following way: (1) an event is "something that happens"; (2) a business event is "an event that has relevance to the business"; and (3) Business Event Processing (BEP) is "the correlation of heterogeneous events in order to achieve smarter business outcomes".
BEP is a term which has come about primarily through IBM's own marketing since the AptSoft acquisition. But a similar term,
Complex Event Processing (CEP), preceded this by some significant time (it was popularised by
David Luckham's 2002 book
The Power of Events). With a nod to the
debate that still simmers about what the CEP term should really signify (is it the processing of compound/aggregated, or "complex" events - or is it application of "complex processing" to events?), IBM's definition of BEP is very close indeed to what seems to be the pre-eminent definition of CEP. This is no accident: on a call to discuss the AptSoft acquisition, IBM's
Sandy Carter explicitly called out her interest in
trying to rename the "CEP category".
All's fair in love and software marketing, I suppose, even when it risks leaving everyone confused (most people are still trying to get their heads around CEP). The real problem I have with this, though, that it's not only a simple renaming that's at work here. When IBM then goes on to talk about the event processing work it's doing, it tells a story that's much broader than the AptSoft technology area, and also broader than what most event-processing folks would think of when they think of CEP. Likewise when IBM refers to "3700 customers" these aren't AptSoft customers (apart from a tiny minority of them). As well as focusing on WebSphere Business Events (the former AptSoft technology) IBM's view of BEP encompasses event-processing capabilities that exist in Tivoli/NetCool systems and network management products, WebSphere MQ Event Broker and MQ Low Latency Messaging, a new stream-based event processing platform called InfoSphere Streams (formerly "
System S"), the SolidDB in-memory database, and many other bits and pieces as well.
In short, it looks like IBM's taking a term that only in January 2008 it used to describe a "business friendly" event processing toolset (the AptSoft technology), and is now instead applying it to any software technology that IBM offers which involves the processing of events. A cynic would say it's got a
big plumbers' canvas toolbag marked "BEP", and is shoving as much into it as possible.
Now the intention of this post isn't just to bash IBM for attempting to subvert the CEP concept. The reason I don't want to leave things here is that there's more to what IBM's doing than meets the eye.
As the press and analyst day unfolded, it became clear (not through the presentations from the IBM execs, tellingly, but through Q&A and one-on-one meetings) that behind the scenes, IBM is actually trying to do something pretty interesting. It's got a big kit-bag of event-processing technologies, yes - but behind this, it's working to put together a common event processing technology framework that will allow its individual technology components to be assembled in different combinations to support different types of business and IT requirements. So, rather than having separate event processing stovepipes in the WebSphere, InfoSphere and Tivoli software portfolios, together with assorted miscellaneous other components, it's enabling all of these distinct efforts to cross-fertilize. One of the first outcomes of this work is the snappily-named
WebSphere Business Events eXtreme Scale, which marries the former AptSoft technology (never marketed as a platform for high-volume processing) to the
WebSphere eXtreme Scale platform.
With this in mind, I think it's a bit of a shame if IBM sticks to referring to its overall event processing architecture effort as BEP. BEP, like CEP and one of my other favourites Composite Application Development, is a "how" name - it says more about a method than its outcome. Or, in other words, although it might appeal to geeks, it says nothing about why anyone would invest in it. What would work much better, in my opinion, would be for IBM to complement (or even replace) its discussions about BEP with discussions more centred around a "what" idea that is more about the business value of event processing - what all these technologies, and the framework being built, actually enable customers to achieve. If IBM hadn't already walked away from the term, I'd suggest something like "on-demand business"... but seeing as that's
verboten these days, I'll keep my thinking cap on. Perhaps "event-driven business"?
Putting all the vendor marketing stuff to one side, what does all this mean for enterprises? First, try and look behind the cynical BEP and CEP marketing stuff. IBM might be mis-stepping in its marketing, but you can be sure that it's serious about building a set of technology offerings to help customers with a variety of event-processing related problems and opportunities. Second, although algorithmic trading and other capital markets applications are where most of the technology market activity in this space has been over the past year or so, try and take a broader perspective of event processing and how it might offer value. Event processing is a useful computing approach, even when the event volumes aren't colossal, or the processing requirement isn't near-real-time, or the processing requirement isn't highly complex.
Lastly: watch out for a free Guest Pass report we'll be publishing on event processing before Christmas, where we’ll attempt to unpick the different scenarios and technology requirements in play.
Labels: BEP, CEP, ibm, industry, SOA
