A simple use-case:

1. Unhappy customer publishes Tweet containing negative sentiment.

2. Correlate Tweeter with frequent flyer membership.

3. Eight hours later, Tweeter receives feedback offer from vendor.

Is this automated marketing reaction, or is it just a coincidence?

If the former, it’s a simple example of Event Processing – a single event detected, classified (sentiment), correlated with standing data and a response dispatched.

Did they need to operate in realtime? Probably not…same day is good enough (but no longer!)

Did they need to use a CEP engine for this? Probably not (perhaps they did it in PHP).

Did they get the right result?