In Waters Rankings 2008, Water’s stirs the mud and confusion in the CEP/EP community by having their constituents vote on both an ESP solution and an CEP solution set, but giving both awards to vendors with stream processing (ESP) engines.   

The two CEP/ESP related Water’s categories were, Best Streaming Data Management Solution and Best Complex Event Processing Solution.    Water’s awards Best Streaming Data Management Solution to data/event stream processing company StreamBase; and then awards Best Complex Event Processing Solution to Oracle’s BEA product, which is built on top of another data/event stream processing engine.  Confused?   

Alexander 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 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.”

Of course, Alex must be politically correct, and rightly so, since he works for Oracle/BEA and Water’s gave them an award.  But on what tangible, objective basis for Best Complex Event Processing Solution?

According to our 2007 survey, CEP/EP Reference Customers 2005-2007, BEA was in last place based on public CEP/EP reference clients.  

Waters’ award  for Best Streaming Data Management Solution to StreamBase is a much more credible.   Congratulations StreamBase.   Most would agree that StreamBase is a streaming data management solution (SDMS), but so are Apama and Coral8 (and BEA etc etc).   

Waters simply muddies the water, unfortunately.