CHAPTER 4
The Rise of Commercial Event Processing
This chapter discusses how commercial applications of complex event processing (CEP) have developed since 2000 and how CEP will be applied in the future through in four stages:
- Simple event processing
- Creeping CEP
- A CEP becomes recognized technology
- CEP becomes ubiquitous and unseen
The explosion of event traffic over the past twenty years created a new set of demands from business enterprises. The IT layers (i.e., the company’s networks, middleware, enterprise service bus, cell phones, and websites) of every sizable business were humming with this traffic, and people in every management role wanted to analyze it and understand its implications for their own roles in the organization. The demand to extract information from the IT layers, sometimes referred to as business intelligence, had increased dramatically. As we shall see, it is difficult to think of anything other than CEP that could have taken place in the processing of higher-level events at a particular point in time around 2000.
This chapter describes four stages of commercial development and adoption that CEP is going through and will go through in the future. As we shall argue in later chapters, the long-term outlook is for CEP to become a contributing technology under the hood of those global applications of real-time information systems that are essential to running our society.
We start with the situation facing event processing vendors at the beginning of the ...
