Tibco RV in a box - would appliances help streaming SQL?

Several others have posted on the new Tibco Messaging Appliance - apparently it's Tibco Rendezvous (RV) in a box OEM'd from Solace Systems. Paul Vincent ponders at the Tibco CEP blog:

It’s quite feasible that the same approach could be used for “basic” complex event processing operations, especially those that don’t require history (or much persistence)

Paul is certainly right that CEP and event/data stream processing engines could benefit from the appliance approach. However I think that it is precisely those applications that require history that could most benefit. A high-speed streaming engine with a co-located database (running with much of the data in cache) gives the perfect environment for answering a wider range of "right-time" BI requirements; the engine can control exactly what needs to be retained and for how long to provide the appropriate time-series data to support whatever aggregated outputs are desired. The database acts as a memory extender (allowing infrequently accessed data to be paged out), as a source of replay / recovery data, and as a history for newly defined streaming queries. The latter is most important - if you want a 1 hour moving average, most streaming queries won't give you the right answer until the end of the first hour.

EAI results - a mixed bag

Back to looking at financials, a note on Motley Fool that touts Tibco as a "king of cash" reminded me to poke around some of the EAI vendors' financial results.

Tibco's Q4 (ending November 06) was pretty spectacular, with revenue up 20% to $160 million - license revenue growth being a very healthy 32% to $88 million. But earnings over the entire year were barely up; Tibco seems to have a pattern of a huge Q4 after flat Q1/2/3.

WebMethods earnings show license income down more than 10% in Q3 to $19.7 million (total revenues $53.1 million). Motley Fool's article New Product, Same Problem suggests that digesting recent acquisitions (eg Infravio) and restructuring the salesforce are affecting sales.

Vitria's results show a startling spike in license revenue up to $6.7 million up from $1.8 million in the same quarter to Dec 2005 - around half of that accounted for by two customers. Encouragingly, Vitria is in the black.

Finally, BEA takes a bit of a beating - shares down 10% even though revenues were up 15% on same quarter last year. Why? because forecasts are down for next quarter (the analysts wanted $385 million, but management expects only $350-364 million).

A Morningstar analyst rounds it all off in the same news item by suggesting that BEA will get tough competition in the SOA space from Oracle, IBM and Tibco.