The 2008 Waters Rankings

(If you are getting this post at the same time as you are getting my post about the Fluffies, read the Fluffies first.)

Coincidentaly, right after I posted the entry about the Jolt awards, I received my hardcopy of Waters Magazine in which they posted articles about their award winners.

What is the difference between the Jolt Awards and the Waters Rankings?

First, I trust the process that Waters has. In order to vote in the Waters Rankings, you need to be a subscriber to Waters. Most people in financial institutions can qualify for a free subscription to Waters, and you can fill out a form to apply. Waters will go through the trouble to qualify you for a subscription, and will make sure that you work for a financial firm. Unlike a magazine like Dr Dobbs, buying a copy of Waters magazine is difficult to do, and individual copies are quite expensive. Therefore, my conclusion is that Waters has a subscription base of highly-qualified financial professionals who have experience with at least some of the products that they vote for.

Second, in the Waters process, the readers themselves vote on the products. Waters received 600 votes this year. In fact, I am constantly receiving emails from Waters, encouraging me to vote on this and that. So, unlike a secretive panel of "highly renowned judges", the users of the products themselves are the ones who vote in the categories. (For the record, I do not participate in the voting.) Waters also goes through a process to weed out votes from the vendors themselves.

So, whereas the Jolt Awards have a lot of question marks associated with them, I trust the Waters Rankings more because I expect that the voters have actually evaluated or used the products that they vote for.

Just like Tim, I find the distinction between the Streaming Data Management category and the Complex Event Processing category to be a confusing one. Nevertheless, congratulations to Streambase's marketing machine. When I was evaluating Streambase, I found many good things about their product, and if their marketing and sales organization did not turn me off so much at the beginning, we might very well be using Streambase instead of Coral8.

It was also good to see Kx Systems in there as the number 3 solution. Kx certainly does not have the marketing oomph that Streambase has, relying on the mystique of Arthur Whitney and its Q and K languages instead. I would consider KDB to be more of a pure streaming data management solution (along with Vhayu) than a CEP solution.


©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.