Like acronyms or not, business event management (BEM) and complex event processing (CEP) are the next step in the fusing of SOA and BPM in business process management suites from major vendors, according to analysts at Forrester Research Inc.

Ken Vollmer, principal analyst at Forrester, had identified these two emerging technologies in a paper titled "Comparing Business Event Management And Complex Event Processing: New Features Add To Overall Business Process Management Suite Capability," which was published in August and may have gotten lost in the summer haze. In that paper he defined what these two new technologies are and why they will be important to the future of SOA projects focused on making business processes more agile.