“In fact, there’s a fine line between business processes and event processing if you consider how an event might impact an in-flight event-triggered process, and Paul declared that BPM is really just a constrained case of CEP.”
You could argue that this simply means that the definition of CEP (aggregating events) is too broad. But I prefer the view that BPM (usually meaning process orchestration via BPMN) is simply, so far, the most used pattern for CEP…

“Having taken over the world of BPM, he moved on to BRM, and showed how CEP systems are better for managing automated rules”
I probably meant to say how CEP are better for automating managed rules. But rule (and process) management is of course a workflow which is usually a type of simple event processing. For example, what events lead you to change a process diagram? Is process change itself a managed process based on events? etc etc.

“This allows historic patterns to be detected in real time (which sounds like a contradiction)”
You are right – it does sound funny. Historic patterns may be discovered via traditional data-based analytics, then mapped to a CEP (or BRE) for pattern detection. Of course, real-time pattern discovery (finding new patterns on the fly) is the domain of real-time analytics (via metarules, for example, in TIBCO)- a pretty new field.

“business users (or at least business analysts) need to be able to understand and model events independent of any particular infrastructure. I completely agree with this…” A rule consultant I once worked with stopped me after the presentation and made this point exactly – analysing rules from an event perspective can be very clarifying (regardless of using CEP, BRE, or BPM).

Cheers