Progress Apama announced a new complex event processing (CEP) customer - a "Dutch Maritime Information and Service provider" called Royal Dirkzwager. The release cited they selected CEP so that can deploy "real-time analysis of shipping information that tracks the arrival of cargo ships to ports around the world." The release talks about the ability to "detect, analyze, and act on several thousands of events in real-time." "We estimate an increase in volumes from 200 locations messages a second to thousands of events a second," said Paul Wieland, the manager of the project.
And on and on this release goes, talking about performance and scalability.
The message Progress sent about this application misses the boat. That is, event processing isn't about "feeds and speeds," in most cases - it's about having a better platform on which to develop event-driven applications. This release is a perfect example of sending the *wrong* message about CEP. Building a system that processes "thousands of events a second" doesn't scare many technologists. But what should scare technologists is finding the best way to simply and easily combine event data. Speed and ease of for event driven applications is big value of CEP, not feeds and speeds. Many applications, like this Royal Dirkzwager application, don't even make most CEP platforms break a sweat on a laptop.
I have a lot of respect for David Olsen, one of the technical field guys at Progress - and thankfully
he got it right in his blog post on Royal Dirkzwager. His post doesn't mention performance as a driver at all - David rightly talks about how CEP helps break down siloed event sources like GPS events, GIS events, automatic identification system (AIS) events, and long range identification and tracking (LRIT) events, and correlate that data with other infrastructure. He also talks about how they use an enterprise service bus (ESB) as a convenient on-and-off ramp for many of their events. Event-driven SOA, CEP, and the ease with which these tools help firms create event-driven applications is exactly the right message. "That's where the magic [of CEP] is," he concludes. Well said, David - perhaps Progress could let you help with the press releases, because you got it right!