Commercial-Off-The-Shelf CEP: the value proposition…
Posted by Paul Vincent
Joe McKendrick over on eBizQ has claimed that CEP is on the verge of enterprise acceptance, subject to “prices being lowered”. That’s an interesting comment - taken it seems from the recent IEEE report on CEP - it’s as if the author spoke to some CIOs who said they would buy into CEP only when the price comes down. But who’s price? Compared to what? Versus what ROI?
Taking TIBCO BusinessEvents as an example of an enterprise CEP system, included “out of the box” you get:
- inference engine
- continuous query engine
- state machine engine
- UML-based modeling tools with model-to-event-driven-system generator (model driven engineering and all that)
- decision management system with business user interface
- high performance+resilient distributed agent platform with multiple configuration options
- distributed in-memory OODB with connections to a RDBMS for backup
- event channels for popular event sources like JMS and TIBCO’s RV
- powerful XML processing tools
- extensibility mechanism via Java.
Seemingly, there are not many complaints about the value proposition here. Sourcing these components separately would cost an arm and a leg, and integrating them would cost guts and all.
So perhaps “prices are lowering” was referring to the availability of tools like BusinessEvents versus enterprises having to build and support their own solutions at far greater cost?
Complex Event Processing (CEP), Trends | 23 April 2009 |
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By James Owen, April 24, 2009 @ 11:42
Paul:
“If the price comes down.” Sounds like those head hunters who assure me that I could get more work if I would just lower my price to that of an entry level or lower worker. Sure, I could. But who would feed the family? Entry-level workers “usually” don’t have the company expenses that we have.
Now, to the absurdity of the comment itself: If the cost of the software is $1M and the cost of failure is $30M or $50M or $100M then the cost of the software is low. If the cost of failure is $1M then, obviously, you don’t invest $1M to save $1M unless the problem MUST be done and the revenue greatly exceeds that of the cost of the software. (I can’t imagine a problem where the cost of failure is $1M and the revenue would be $30M but I suppose someone will point that out to me should I make that assumption.)
Good luck with the nattering nabobs of negativity.
SDG
jco
By vincent, April 26, 2009 @ 13:09
Hi James - fully agree. The ROI is the key.
Cheers
By vincent, May 1, 2009 @ 09:30
Humorous anecdote from Gartner’s Dave McCoy on this topic - http://blogs.gartner.com/dave_mccoy/2009/04/28/off-the-shelf-versus-custom-talking-about-car-mats/