CEP Adoption Is Broader, Deeper, And More Business-Driven Than IT May Expect

Many application development and enterprise architecture professionals assume that complex event processing (CEP) is a natural extension of IT activities and systems. Current Forrester research indicates that while CEP complements IT, it most often operates outside the conventional boundaries of IT and the systems that IT controls. Application developers in IT understand traditional events, especially those concerning monetary transactions and those that are subject to high-volume automation. But many other nontraditional events (from the IT point of view) exist, such as those that are directly emitted by equipment in the physical world. Developers and architects often know painfully little about these events and how they are used to run a business. The result? IT will have to learn how to coexist productively with complex analytical computing environments that the business shapes and controls, with minimal input from IT.