My reply is that I don’t care must about reported dollar sales because these numbers are, for the most part, meaningless and mythical at this point in time. Large companies sell enterprise licenses and make up allocated numbers for the CEP/EP share of the pie based on a subjective formulation. They can sell an enterprise site license for $2,000,000 USD that includes CEP/EP software and claim 20% is CEP revenue, regardless of if the software is used or not.

Small companies nearly give software away with the hope of developing a strong public reference client, which are few and far between in 2008. Soon, I will start a Google spreadsheet, similar to what we did last year on this topic. Some folks don’t seem to like this initiative because, unfortunately, we will see that for this half of 2008, this year has been very lean for CEP/EP. Some would prefer I blog as a cheerleading evangelist versus an objective analyst. Go Fight Win! Rah Rah Rah!

Much of the current gloomy situation, of course, is because the entire market has fallen and IT spending is down. Financial companies announce record losses. Bankruptcies and restructuring are in the daily news.

In this depressed market, some companies have tried to tie the subprime crash to CEP, somehow implying that CEP would have helped, but that positioning is mostly fantasy. I work in the field of risk management at the corporate level and the current problems are not caused by a lack of technology, it is simply corporate greed - corporations taking high risks to stay competitive in a bull market and then they experience a frighteningly negative reversal during a market free fall.

Of course, the US Federal Reserve did not help matters when they decided to poke a gaping hole in the real estate bubble by dramatically raising interest rates without thinking about how they would manage the consequences, but that is another story! After all, the current top government executives in Washington DC are so politically, scientifically and economically incompetent that all we can do is hold our breath and count the days.

One risk management colleague often says,

“When then tide is high, you can’t see that the swimmers are naked.”

….and so it is in business. The current problems in the global market are based on human, social, and political errors and incompetence; nothing that technology can cure at this point in the game. So, the entire market is in decline, and folks are overhyping all software to keep the buzz going, as if CEP or SOA or BPM would have helped stopped the current global meltdown. Yes, CEP can stop global warming! Buy one today, save a cute polar bear!

Then again, maybe we only need a CEP engine in Washington; even a simple rules-based one would be good. Naturally, some would suggest that we need Neural Nets and Bayesian analytics; but I think just a simple rules-engine looking out the window that can process if-then-else conditions would be a great improvement over the mind-numbing leadership in Washington today.

One of the projects leaders uses terms that should warm every New Yorker's heart, if he or she knew what they meant. IT head Paul Cosgrave says the system will overcome silos, an often disparaging term for the separation of resources across groups that can only expensively be overcome. It's the government and business equivalent of the academic problem of a lack of cross-discipline focus.

One of the first applications allows sanitation workforce managers a frighteningly precise amount of knowledge about routes, activities, and behavior of trucks in their territory. Let's hope that's not misused! Efficiency is one thing; micro-management is another.

Another project is testing wireless water-meter reading. The city hopes to spend $90 per meter for the upgrade and shed part of a $12.2m contract with Con Edison that covers 850,000 units. What should be useful about this is that problems can be detected by monitoring waterflow patterns, which in turn allows the often huge problems that take months to notice (occurring underground or in basements where rivers formerly flowed) to be stopped before they turn into multi-million-dollar problems for property owners or the city. Anytime anything happens in Manhattan, it's a multi-million dollar problem.