I’ve spent the last couple of days, after absorbing the Sybase acquisition of Aleri’s assets, looking at the various CEP players websites for evidence of cloud (grid name du jour) deployment.

I haven’t found anything worth mentioning.  That’s not to say that I might have missed something.  But my guess is that with all the economic woes lately, that the CEP vendors have either chosen to ignore or just simply aren’t aware that the rest of the world is actually solving real problems with cloud deployments.

Which is interesting.

It’s interesting because one of the pioneers in CEP & database space, Mike Stonebreaker (love that name), has gone on to work in stealth mode (it says stealth on their web site anyway) over at VoltDB. VoltDB is based upon work done on HStore and would appear, on the surface anyway, to incorporate all of the things we’d expect in an OTP environment without all the traditional definitions of an OTP environment.  The database is dead, long live the database.

This is even more interesting.

It’s even more interesting because this approach would seem to indicate a combined database, CEP, lots of cheap hardware type-o-solution.  Kind of sounds like a cloud, doesn’t it?  (this is an extreme simplification, but for our purposes here doesn’t really matter)

So if Stonebreaker is already working on this, why haven’t any of the other CEP or column store vendors announced any intentions in this area?

Perhaps it’s because that the current incarnation of CEP products don’t lend themselves well to grid deployments.  None of the current crop of products include a message bus or cache, something that’s necessary for grid deployment.  And because this crucial component is missing, chances are that the products were never really architected for the “I don’t care where a message is coming from and I don’t care where it’s going” kind of world.  The kind of world we are increasingly living in.  The kind of world that readily lends itself to cloud computing.

Or maybe it’s because the current set of offerings doesn’t include any meaningful management or monitoring solutions.  Solutions that abstract the physical deployment in order of operational or business areas and allow the business to be monitored proactively.

Or maybe it’s because there’s no easy way to push new CEP based services out to the cloud in a non-invasive way – without actually having to stop services.

Or maybe it’s some other reason or reasons that I’m not aware of.

Or maybe I’m wrong and there’s lots of grid/cloud based CEP deployments out there and they’re not telling anyone what they’re up to.