If you have been following CEP, you could not have possibly missed the raging debate on the question of "Is CEP Mature?" I am not going to answer this question here. As it often happens, the answer depends on the definition of "mature", "CEP", and, I suspect, "is".

(Yes, I'm trying to learn from the best, in this case from the very excellent blog by Opher Etzion which has very cool pictures in every post.)

A lot has been written on the various CEP accomplishments over the past five years, but also about the challenges that lie ahead. Personally, when I think about the current state of CEP, I can't help but think about the famous words of Winston Churchill: "This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But, it is, perhaps the end of the beginning."

It's hard to disagree with this statement. If you compare CEP to a truly mature market, e.g., the market for relational databases, then it's easy to see that CEP has a long way to go. Yet if you compare the state of the CEP to, say the year 2003, when Coral8 was founded, it's hard to argue that the CEP community has not made a lot of progress.

Then why is this debate raging? One may argue that the people who claim that CEP is mature are mainly CEP vendors, and it's in their interest to do so. But I think the answer is a bit different.

As an amateur economist (isn't everyone these days?), I like to think about what makes markets efficient or inefficient. One concept that comes up all the time is information asymmetry. Information asymmetry refers to situations when buyers and sellers in a market have different levels of access to information. Consider, for example, the markets for used cars or health insurance. In the first case, the seller of the car knows a lot more about the car than the buyer. In the second case, the buyer of health insurance knows a lot more about his or her health than the seller. This makes these markets highly inefficient, as anybody who's tried to buy a used car or health insurance will readily testify.

What does it have to do with CEP? A lot. I claim that CEP vendors know a lot more about CEP success than the general public does. I'm sure you've seen a table compiled by Tim Bass listing the number of publicly announced customers for each CEP vendor. The table would be pretty funny, if it was not so sad. According to this table, no CEP vendor has more than 4 customers! This is hardly a sign of a mature market.

I don't want to speak for every CEP vendor out there, and I don't want to name names or exact numbers, but I know for a fact that every major CEP vendor has several dozen paying customers. Not thousands of customers, not hundreds of customers, but several dozen - for sure. I believe this is why vendors have a more positive view on CEP's maturity - they see the use cases and success stories that support the view!

As I mentioned earlier, information asymmetry is not a good thing. It prevents the CEP market from developing faster, as prospects have a skewed view of how mature the products really are. So why do existing customer resist telling their stories, and even resist being named? "We believe that the use of Corla8 gives us a strategic advantage over our competitors. Why would we want to clue them in?" - this is what we, and probably other vendors, hear over and over and over.

It's a bit hard to argue with this logic, but again this represents a problem for accelerating the growth of CEP. I think identifying the problem is half the challenge. But what can we, as a community, do to solve this problem? Perhaps we can learn something from other communities? If anybody has any great stories or suggestions, I'd like to hear them.

Mark Tsimelzon, President & CTO, Coral8