Recently, Waters published its ranking for best solution and services for the year of 2008.
I am very glad to see WebLogic Event Server, re-branded as Oracle CEP, as the winner of the best complex event processing (CEP) solution.
There is still plenty for us to do, but I do think we have come a long way in the past two/three years, and we have constantly tried to innovate, both at the container level as well as at the programming model.
Interesting enough, there is a separate Best Streaming Data Management Solution category, which was awarded to the company Streambase.
Personally, I do think there is an implementation difference between streaming data management systems (SDMS), whose roots are deep from DBMS technology, and complex event processing systems (CEP), term which I believe was coined by David Luckham, focusing on event relationships (e.g. causality, aggregation). The keyword being implementation difference, as there is a large overlap on the use-cases that both address.
Regardless, I find it intriguing that Waters not only does not state the differences between the categories, but also uses the term CEP several times in the SDMS category.
I guess the verdict is that there is still confusion amongst the experts regarding event and stream processing… And that both products must be very good.
A World of Events 
[…] Alves, currently employed by Oracle, previously having worked for BEA Systems, in Best Complex Event Processing Solution, observes: “Regardless, I find it intriguing that Waters not only does not state the […]
I believe I owe a few explanations in response to http://www.thecepblog.com/2008/07/16/muddy-waters/
First of all, it states that BEA was in the last place based on a public 2005-2007 survey on CEP/ESP client references. Considering that BEA had just released the first version of its CEP/ESP product, WebLogic Event Server, in July/August of 2007, having just one fewer reference than the likes of Coral8 and Aleri, each respectively had 2 references, is, in my opinion, a positive.
Secondly, it states that BEA CEP/ESP product has very few public customer references. Generally, in my experience in the industry, customers are only willing to provide public references after they have gone through at least one full development/production cycle with the product. In other words, clients do not provide references when they buy the product, but rather when they have successfully gone into production with the product. This means that new products will have an initial lag in providing public customer references. This is inevitable, but generally only a valid indication of lack of sales after this product has been in the market for at least several years.
Thirdly, it is a misconception that BEA CEP/ESP product is, or includes, the open-source Esper product. in actuality, BEA bought a license to the source code of Esper, which allowed BEA to use and change the code as it saw fit, without having to disclose the changes or commit code back into the open-source community, or even use the code at all. In fact, if one examines the language specified by the BEA product, BEA EPL (Event Processing Language), it has no more resemblance to Esper’ EQL than it does to other ESP products, such as Streambase and Coral8. This is not a criticism to Esper, but rather an explanation that BEA WebLogic Event Server is not and does not include Esper.
And finally, my initial comment on Waters was by no means meant as a criticism of its methodology or results, but rather as a a criticism of the lack of information provided in the web-site that described the award categories.