Intelligent Enterprise invites a few “talking heads” to give their “Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice Awards” every year, so its the time now for the 2010 edition. They selected a “top 12″ and then 12 each in categories of BI, Enterprise Applications and Information Management. Complex Event Processing got a fair share of references:

• Top 12 companies: CEP mentions were for 2 for of the 12 (Informatica and Sybase) who both acquired CEP technologies in the last 12 months; in addition 3 other companies in this list have CEP technology (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft).
• BI companies: CEP gets one mention in this list, under the TIBCO banner:

TIBCO could just as easily be listed among our Information Management Ones to Watch. But this firm sets itself apart by helping companies interpret — as well as manage and integrate — data and events. TIBCO Spotfire provides trend-spotting analysis through easily understood data visualizations. The company also offers complex event processing (CEP) for the broad market, where insight into events will make real-time BI a reality.

• Enterprise Applications: one mention here too, under Progress’ Apama division.
• Information Management: CEP gets a mention here, albeit for Streambase as a merger (aka “closer ties”) candidate for Vertica (although this seems unlikely IMHO).

So how did CEP do on the hypemeter here?
CEP:  5 company summaries included “CEP” or “Complex Event Processing”
Cloud: 7 company summaries included “cloud”
BPM: 2 mentions!
SOA: 1 mention!!!

But the winner was:
Analytics: 9 mentions, and they didn’t even mention this under TIBCO (whose Spotfire S+ is a pretty good contender)!

The CEP-BI-analytics theme was also recognised by Forrester’s James Kobelius in a recent blog posting. James identifies CEP under “analytics”, and says:

In this race, the vendor that has integrated BI, CEP, and PA/DM most effectively for the mass market is TIBCO Spotfire.

He goes on: Just as important,TIBCO’s offerings enable pushdown of predictive models to CEP, data warehouses, business process platforms, and other application platforms.

So if CEP should be counted in the same boat as analytics, then indeed there is a new world order for software technology in 2010:

Cloud, SOA and BPM: 10 mentions
CEP and Analytics: 14 mentions

IE just published an article on “4 Technologies That Are Reshaping Business Intelligence”, namely

• Predictive Analytics (see TIBCO S+ and Miner)
• Real-time monitoring (ergo Complex Event Processing, see TIBCO BusinessEvents)
• In-memory processing (see the above tools, and also TIBCO Spotfire)
• SaaS (a matter of packaging and deployment tooling, see also “cloud”)

On CEP, the article says
“Complex event processing is a technology that companies are starting to use more broadly to make monitoring more real time. Sprung from the lab projects and custom deployments of fast-trading Wall Street brokerages in the 1990s, commercial off-the-shelf products have taken shape the last five years. Mainstream uses have emerged in supply chains, shipping and logistics, retail, utilities, and other time-sensitive applications.“

Of course, this is why we use the term Business Optimization, and sometimes Operational Intelligence, to differentiate CEP-driven systems over the “reports over tea and biscuits” type of historical BI… but then businesses never ask for “complex events”, they want insight. For better decisions. Basically what BI promised.