Alex - Esper brings Complex Event Processing (CEP) to mainstream

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Esper brings Complex Event Processing (CEP) to mainstream

[ avasseur ] 18:06, Friday, 13 July 2007

There has been two interesting posts recently regarding Esper.

One from Tim Bass, from Tibco, reporting from the InformationSecurityAsia2007.
Tim reports in his blog that complex event processing solutions like Esper can be used for extrusion detection (that is inverse of intrusion detection in a network where you want to track malicious users and software acting from inside, zombi machines etc.).
Tim reports Esper is already known from several experts in the field and is beeing considered for such use cases. Glad to hear and thanks Tim for the info.

The second interesting news appears in Intelligent Enterprise where Esper is beeing quoted as the only active open-source project for CEP - both for Java and .Net platforms (what, you never heard about NEsper? Bet you will !).

Esper is quoted separately from the so called more commercial solutions like Apama, StreamBase, Coral8, Tibco etc. Especially because Esper is a great initiative to bring CEP to mainstream thru innovative, affordable and a la carte approach as quoted here:

Not For Big Companies Only. With the ranks of CEP practitioners including big government, big finance and big telco, you might think the technology is accessible only to giants . That's not the case, however, as there's an active open-source CEP project called Esper that offers both Java and .NET components.

It 's nice to see Esper quoted, although I am not sure I would do such a difference between Esper and the others solutions available for the following reasons:

Esper is commercially backed and supported - checkout Esper' founder company EsperTech

Esper users include major investment banks already and other big shops - checkout the mailing list if you want to get a taste

Of course I can't say if those guys are evaluating Esper or if they run some of their production system with it already - so you never know who is a user evaluating software and who is ready / has already entered the commercial relationship with commercially backed open source software unless you ask and they dare to reveal it.

There's trully no difference in fact when you look at that from a community point of view.
When you are building open source software (which I have been doing for years now) there is only one thing that matters: the community.
The community rules the use cases and drives the product direction in unanticipated ways accross industries of all kind and size.

This is a typical mistake regularly done when trying to compare open source software and commercial software as two fundamentally different things. Would you start saying Linux is for small companies and Windows for the big ones...