Complex Event Processing meets Business Intelligence: CEP BI

EsperTech has announced a technology agreement with Business Objects, an SAP company. The news describes::
"EsperTech (...) unveiled that Business Objects, an SAP company and the world's leading provider of business performance optimization solutions, will incorporate EsperTech's Esper product, for evaluation, into Business Objects Labs' "Event Driven BI" prototype"

Beyond the headlines, you can actually download and run the real world prototype from Business Objects Labs that integrates BusinessObjects XI 3.0 ( XCelsius 2008, InfoView, BI Widgets) with Esper, and also access a recorded demo.

This is a really great combination, and it's great to see how BO worked on abstracting the Esper CEP into Business Intelligence semantics that is known by their user base and target audience rather than creating yet another CEP engine or claiming "we do CEP too" without true innovation.

Also interesting, Coral8 has also announced a "Marketing and Technology" agreement with Actuate. Actuate is a fairly smaller BI player, but well know for beeing the maker of the open source Eclipse hosted BIRT platform.

I am really a big fan of CEP + BI/real time dashboard integration, and it is great to see those two announcements, that further bring CEP into the hands of business users through various level of visual and semantics abstractions.

There are also some great side comments to draw from those 2 news showing up at roughly the same time:

• Business Objects, Actuate (who are competitors), are probably right in their approach, and so are EsperTech and Coral8 (who are competitors): rising tide raises all boats.
• It (again) demonstrates EsperTech has grown well beyond its initial BEA OEM relationship (Esper powers WebLogic Event Server / now Oracle), up to the point of beeing used by an Oracle top competitor: SAP.
• If you haven't done so, checkout EsperTech EsperJDBC - a bridge between Esper CEP and any JDBC compliant tool. It shipped in May 2008 and includes a nice demo that is using ... BIRT!
  

EsperJDBC Sample code and recorded demo (follow the "EsperJDBC and Business Intelligence reporting and charting with Eclipse BIRT" demo link) available.

It seems that while EsperTech worked early in that area, beyond technology, Coral8 secured some more marketing ;-) Well done folks.