Following on from my blog at the beginning of the year entitled “Predictions for 2008″ which predicted that Complex Event Processing (CEP) would be a hot topic this year, IBM has moved already in to play in this market by their acquisition today of AptSoft. With the growth in SOA and business process management as well as some verticals such as manufacturing, logistics, retail and pharmaceuticals all investing in RFIDs we are set for an explosion of events on a scale we have never seen before in commercial business. Because of potentially significant business benefits in bottom line savings and revenue from being more responsive to events, CEP should not be ignored. This is a major emerging marketplace that offers automated business optimization and actions in a much more timely manner. There is no way business will be able to change applications at the pace required to keep up with demand to monitor business events over the next few years, There has to be a better way of doing this. That way is CEP – a declarative approach that involves no programming. CEP is the next generation beyond BAM. This announcement may well see IBM’s competitors move in on this market to compete considering the growth potential. While the backlog of IT systems requiring SOA integration is growing, companies should educate themselves in this field as they may well benefit from looking at CEP as a way to become more responsive to business events rather than building everything themselves. There is no doubt that the era of “Right Time” BI has begun.
Posts Tagged ‘IBM’
IBM Moves on Complex Event Processing
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008IBM Finally Moves on BI by Acquiring Cognos
Monday, November 12th, 2007Today IBM finally moved to plug the hole in its software product portfolio by announcing the acquisition of Cognos for $5bn USD http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22572.wss. This acquisition has been on the cards for a long time with several analysts including myself wondering how long it would be before we saw Big Blue move on Cognos (see my previous blog http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/blogs/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=6976&blog_id=1) . This is almost a perfect fit for IBM given that it needed a BI vendor to provide tooling for reporting and analysis that had not much in the way of market share in the data integration space. The reason is that IBM is already the market leader in the data integration space with Information Server and does not want the ‘baggage’ of dealing with another product in that area. Cognos has never been a major player in data integration with its Data Manager product.
So you can expect IBM to immediately want to integrate Information Server with the Cognos product line. I also would expect that the WebSphere Metadata Server (bundled with Information Server) will be integrated with Cognos Framework Manager so that Cognos metadata ends up in the Metadata Server itself at some future release point. IBM also has had several joint development initiatives with Cognos and so there is a lot of integration already.
The only question mark will be in the area of performance management where Cognos has had a strong position for some time. IBM’s own Performance Management product IBM ActiveInsight will now have to come together with the Cognos Performance Management products. If this does not happen then the future of ActiveInsight as a product may well be in jeopardy. Time will tell.
So, the independent BI vendors are falling like nine pins as the software giants finally move in on the market. With Hyperion already falling to Oracle and Business Objects to SAP, it leaves only one large independent BI vendor left in the market – SAS. Of course SAS is privately owned and so will continue on that way until such time as its CEO (Dr Jim Goodnight) decides otherwise. MicroStrategy also remains independent also along with other smaller BI vendors. Expect further mergers and acquisitions to follow as the rest of the market consolidates to compete with the giants.