I just recently submitted my votes regarding the formation of two working groups within the Event Processing Technical Society. The two working groups are Data & Business Value.
The Data working group is a no brainer – getting one’s hands on data for testing and implementing use cases is always difficult but quite necessary.
The Business Value working group I’m not so sure about. I’ll tell you why; here is an excerpt from the working group document:
Although there are several well established vendors on the EP market, currently there is no clear, common-accepted view on the business value of the EP applications. However, the existence of the business value is more than obvious, e.g. Gartner has defined three main business values of the EP application: Better decision quality, Faster response, Reduction in the information overload
Wow.
Well, I could get better decision quality, faster response and a reduction in information overload using Microsoft Excel and Pivot Tables. Why should I spend a gazillion $$ per processor for this? I guess Gartner doesn’t know?
In looking at the three main business values of an EP application, according to Gartner, it would appear that Gartner has arrived at these conclusions based upon the current vendor’s product set – which all seem to focus on algo trading or risk management. These areas are hard to understand for ‘outsiders’ but can be summed up by better, faster, less; so maybe that’s where Gartner’s conclusion comes from.
I don’t know. To be honest, I never used Gartner research all that much back when I was a CIO except to make sure, for the hum drum projects, that we were looking at the top three vendors in the space. All of my other projects (the majority) seemed to be focused on either creating competitive advantage or leapfrogging my competitors – none of which was going to happen by selecting the same vendor as my competitor for a particular solution. I spent the majority of my time either creating internal technical advantages or partnering with early stage companies. And I know that the majority of my counterparts did the same – we were all in a race to find ‘the next big thing.’
One thing I do know; however, is that, in my opinion, a technical society shouldn’t be doing sales and marketing work for the vendors. If the vendors in this space, which all claim that CEP is mature and pervasive, can’t come up with a better statement of business value than what’s above, no wonder they’re having a difficult time outside of Capital Markets. Because if the vendors know what the value is, then this working group can be reduced to:
- Go to each vendor site,
- Download customer success story
- Distill salient business value derived from solution
- Cut & Paste
- Done
- Repeat quarterly
I’ll even volunteer to do the cutting & pasting.