Thank You Gartner - Event Processing Conference #1 In the Books

John Trigg
Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:50:24 -0500
Between September 19th and 21st,Gartner held its first conference on Complex Event Processing and BusinessActivity Monitoring in Orlando, Florida. Some 200 people(by my estimation) came together to meet others interested in thesetechnologies, as well as see and hear presentations from a range ofGartner analysts, CEP vendors, educators and thought leaders, and mostimportantly users of CEP. The conference was bookended by impressivepresentations from Roy Schulte and Bill Gassman on Day One settingout the current state of the CEP and BAM market, and by Dr David Luckham whoclosed the conference with a thoughtful and insightful look at the future ofCEP.

We'll blog entries about different aspects of the conferenceover the coming days and weeks. But for now it is important to stress howvital the timing of this conference was and how its attendees have shown thatthe principles of CEP are beginning to take hold in a wide array of industriesand solutions. Between the 3 conference tracks organized by Gartner(Event Processing, Business Activity Monitoring and Event Processing in Bankingand Capital Markets) and the vendor sponsored sessions, we heard descriptionsof applications of CEP in a variety of scenarios ranging from algo trading toclickstream analysis to content distribution to manufacturing and many more.

Architectural presentations were also prevalent with manysound ideas being put forward on the relationship between the ever evolvingalphabet soup of CEP, BAM, SOA, EDA, BPM, OLTP, ESB and I am sure, manyothers. Bringing together an audience such as this to discuss bothpractical implementations and more theoretical research allows insight toflow around the CEP community and to understand the ramifications for when CEPis seen as more than just event feeds and event processing speeds. For true application infrastructures to be built on the principles andtechnologies of CEP, a wide understanding of how we can evolve therelationships between these disciplines will be key. And thatunderstanding will come from the continued holding of conferences such as thisone (already looking forward to next year in
New York) and interplay between the manydisciplines, vendors and consumers of these technologies.

Dr Luckham posited that CEP will become a ubiquitousinfrastructure technology in some 30 years. For that to be true -indeed for it to happen sooner - we all have a lot of work to put in ... but youcan be sure that it will be worth it.

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