IBM WebSphere Business Events - going Esper? And WebSphere eXtreme Scale going on his own? And so does ILOG?

As you may already know, IBM complemented its CEP/BEP offering with the AptSoft acquisition back in January 2008.
And they got SMILE continuous query processing research going on, and integration into their data grid WebSphere eXtreme Scale / ObjectGrid offering.
And now they got ILOG.
So what's the strategy around?

As with all IBM products, software downloads for trial and comprehensive documentation is available online, and you will quickly notice that WebSphere Business Events (v6) requires a good old database. This is where intermediate state will be kept and where correlation will occur.
Interestingly, CEP emerged out a wider trend that seeks to revolutionize the way we manage data (remember we sometime refered to Active Database in the academic work that precedes current CEP product offering) with a shift from "store then query" to "query as it comes" - or in other words, store the queries and flow data thru aka "continuous queries".

This quickly makes me claim that IBM WebSphere Business Events is lacking a big piece of the CEP platform puzzle, and likely why IBM is willing to complement this with another solution for more troughput/latency sensitive use cases with its InfoSphere Streams vision. Indeed, for that one, you'll have to wait late 2010 as explained.

So now should we assume that Esper will take part in an IBM offering sometime down the road? Or should we assume that Esper got it so right that Esper materials end up in an IBM "what is WebSphere Business Events" slide?

Here are some surprising hints. The nice "Advanced Event Processing" one is Esper, as described in the EsperTech site for more than 2 years. It appears in a slide deck from IBM Pulse 2008 partner conference.




(disclaimer: Up until now, WebSphere Business Events v6 is not built upon Esper)

To add to IBM offering description around CEP or business event as they call it, you'll notice that WebSphere eXtreme Scale (former IBM ObjectGrid) has now integrated the IBM Smile research in it thus exposing some IBM made SQL like event processing language (similar to Esper and Coral8 approach). This approach is different from the WebSphere Business Event product although it largely overlaps in what it does.

CREATE VIEW stockView AS SELECT tickerSymbol, avg(price) as avgPrice FROM
(SELECT * FROM stockStream FETCH LATEST 5 MINUTES) group by tickerSymbol

There are some interesting tutorials available, and I think this part of IBM offering would deserve a lot more exposure in the CEP community.

Instead of that, IBM disparate vision around event processing just added ILOG to the cake as per this just released press coverage:
"IBM Completes ILOG Acquisition, Opens Door To Event Processing"
But I am not learning you anything since on IBM owns terms:
"None of these products amounted to a real strategy. We didn't have tight engineering, focused on business event management".

It will be interesting to see where that ends...