The previous CEP Market review earlier this year had a few suggestions for new entries: so we ‘ve updated the chart with what data we could find. Hope this is useful.

Note: please comment on this post any suggested changes, births, deaths and marriages in the event processing tooling market, and I’ll incorporate the changes in the next version.

Time for an update for the CEP Market Survey. Jerry Baulier (who has departed from SAP Sybase Aleri) had mentioned to me another research project for the history timeline, and last year’s DEBS conference reminded me I had omitted Truviso. And then in the last week or so we have seen the Germans arrive in force, with the SAP BusinessObjects announcement of its repackaging of the Sybase Aleri product (alongside their in-memory database Hana that could in future compete with TIBCO ActiveSpaces) and SoftwareAG announce the renaming of its recent CEP acquisition this year (yet another product name based on Business Events!). Elsewhere there is speculation on the CEP market following all the recent acquisitions in the fast-database market …

Thanks to SeekingAlpha for the Q3 Earnings Call with analysts transcription. Items of interest to the CEP market watchers are:

COO, Murray Rode: … Our business optimization portfolio grew 70% over last year, driven by both Business Events and Spotfire. …

Analyst: Okay. Then the growth in optimization was pretty amazing. Could you talk a little bit about was that weighted more towards Spotfire or CEP and what was the - a little more detail behind the drivers there?

CEO, Vivek Ranadive: We’re seeing strong growth from both areas Nabil, and Spotfire is obviously very strong, but we saw very, very strong growth in CEP as well. The two of them are actually are starting to play well together and there isn’t a customer on the planet, I don’t care what industry you’re in, but everybody is trying to create the next generation of customer loyalty programs, and you just can’t do that with transactional database 20th century technology. So people want to be able look at events and then make offers on the spot based on those events. So this is a huge opportunity for both Spotfire and CEP.

A recent CEP RFP requested marketshare data for the “CEP market“, worldwide and in specific territories. Presumably the contracts departments for large enterprises are hoping that software development tool purchases are tracked by some industry body (Nielsens maybe) just like Cornflake packets and Persil washing powder. Unfortunately, this is not the case - and of course the definition of “customer” is itself open to interpretation (someone who uses the software? someone who paid money for the software? a licensee?). Some companies also embed “CEP software” in larger categories of software (e.g. messaging or BAM); others sell only stacks that might include CEP licenses, without necessarily any use of said licenses.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to try and find some data points here. Software companies generally make “customer numbers” claims via press releases and in analyst reports, as well as SEC etc reports, and these can be collated and cross-referenced to try and come to a “big picture”. Doing so finds some interesting details such as:

• the most recent available data (for 2008-2009) gives TIBCO BusinessEvents the leading market share figure of 28% (by number of customers)
• this market share number has pretty much remained constant (except for one anomoly year, when it was 10 points higher!) for the previous 4 years
• other established CEP vendor shares are 21%, 18% and 14%  - a pretty even spread overall, if the data is accurate
• the cutoff date for available data (early 2009) excludes any major effects from the large companies getting involved in CEP (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft) which, along with CEP market growth and the addition of many new startups, will likely make future numbers difficult to interpret
• vendors 2, 3 and 4 (in order of market share) report being almost exclusively (>80%) in financial / capital markets - so probably ~50% of business in CEP (to-date) is in the financial area
• overall market growth, year on year, was up to 60% initially, but dropped to just over 30% in the latest numbers. Something to do with the financial market meltdown, perhaps?

It seems that publishing the CEP Market survey is a “preceding event” for some change in the market - no sooner do we update the 2010 market view then another vendor adjustment takes place. Last month mid-tier RDBMS vendor Sybase got acquired by ERP vendor SAP (completing a chain of new corporate identities for Coral8 employees who became Aleri in Mar09, Sybase in Feb10, and now SAP in May10)…

We also made a few other updates, such as adding in the IBM R&D Amit product - the one that IBM management decided to bypass when it acquired Aptsoft to be its “version of Business Events” in 2008. I hadn’t realised that Amit was embedded in a few other IBM product offerings… so is worthy of inclusion in the chart. I adjusted a few other start times based on evidence of “first customer project” too - but clearly that data is still more subjective than it could be.

So - what will change next?