Although a significant amount of research has investigated the benefits of distributed CEP in terms of scalability and extensibility, there is an ongoing reluctance in deploying distributed CEP in an industrial context. In this paper we present the DHEP system developed together with the IBM laboratory in Böblingen. It addresses some of the key problems in increasing the acceptance of distributed CEP, for example supporting interoperability between heterogeneous event processing systems. We present the concepts behind the DHEP system and show how those concepts help to achieve scalable and extensible event processing in an industrial context. Moreover, we verify in an evaluation study that the additional cost imposed by the DHEP system is moderate and 'affordable' for the benefits provided.