Well here’s an interesting post from someone at PWC consulting.

http://www.pwc.com/extweb/home.nsf/docid/FB2EF3AC6E351ECC8525746B00676021

The way he’s presenting it, he appears to have seen the beginnings of an IT nirvana by linking business intelligence, rules and process management together to create a whole new “intelligent business process platform”, although it takes a “heroic effort” - no doubt through extensive services.

He also says that “enterprises that create value through rapid process changes are beginning to define a market opportunity for a preintegrated suite of tools that supports intelligent business performance management.”

I think he’s onto something there. Call us, PWC. We’ll talk.

He also found and interviews someone in SAP to explain how they will be framing these categories as applications that people will adopt similar to the ERP adoption pattern.

Hmmm….

For the former, this begs the question, is BPM a ready made problem for CEP to solve? Or vice versa?

For the SAP position, well… nah, I’m not gonna comment on that one. SAP provides too many customers to companies like TIBCO to solve / and or augment their ERP systems.

What do you think?

A couple of things going on from September to the end of the year, which may be of interest to those learning about Complex Event Processing and related topics…

15-16 Sept: Gartner Event Processing Summit (Stamford, CT).
Lots of CEP vendors speaking here! Last year was the first EP Summit, and very successful with some fascinating topics. [Disclosure: TIBCO are a Platinum Sponsor].
From $1500.

17-19 Sept: EPTS‘ 4th Event Processing Symposium (colocated with Gartner).
Few details yet, but a must for all CEP vendors. Update: EPTS members and invitation-only (see comment 1 below).

6-7 Oct: BPM Think Tank 2008 (Chicago, IL).
TIBCO are running a roundtable on “Combining Event Processing with BPMS for Agility”.
From $750.

For those who prefer a Eurozone event, there is
11-12 Nov: BPM ThinkTank 2008 Europe (Putten, NL).
From $600 incl VAT (bizarrely, as Europeans expect to pay in Euros…).

26-30 Oct: Business Rules Forum (Orlando, FL).
TIBCO are talking CEP here, bridging the BR and CEP worlds. Interesting papers include event-based marketing, rules engines on an ESB (though I suspect not an EDA), semantics of processes, services and events, business rules and CP (yes, that’s CP not CEP), and leveraging event processing for better faster decisions.
From $1300 + tutorials.

Co-located with this on 30-31 Oct: RuleML 2008, including a keynote by David Luckham on CEP.
From $500.