You've heard it before but it warrants repeating: Every natural and man-made system is becoming instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. We now have the ability to measure, sense and monitor the condition of almost everything. Furthermore, people, systems and objects can communicate and interact with each other in entirely new ways. This means that we can respond to changes quickly and get better results by predicting and optimising for future events.
That's the good news but there are challenges.
Today, more than ever, organisations are under pressure to leverage a wealth of information to make more intelligent choices.
Volume of data: Data volumes are expected to grow tenfold in the next three years. This is driven by the proliferation of end-user devices, real-world sensors, lower-cost technologies and population growth.Velocity of decision-making: The market demands that businesses optimise decisions, take action based on good information and utilise advanced predictive capabilities - all with speed and efficiency.
Variety of information: With the expansion of information comes large variances in the complexion of available data - very noisy with lots of errors and no opportunity to cleanse it in a world of real-time decision-making.
Shift in what we analyse: Enterprises need a broader, systems-based approach to the information they examine and optimise. Stream computing and event processing capabilities are enabling the analysis of massive volumes.
Event Processing
Event processing provides us with an approach to leverage this wealth of information for competitive advantage and for the betterment of people
An Event: Any signal indicating that a change of state (of the business, real-world or other domain) has occurred or contemplated as having occurred.
Simple Event Processing (SEP): Simple event processing is not a new concept. SEP provides functions to detect and respond reactively to a single source, or homogeneous event type.
Complex Event Processing (CEP): Detect and respond reactively to patterns among like or related events, missing events and aggregate events. CEP supports high volumes of homogenous events within a predictable time and order.
Business Event Processing (BEP): Extends CEP and provides a graphical, non-programmatic user interface that allows business users to manage event processing logic themselves. Supports high volumes of heterogenous business events and complex patterns that occur in no particular time or order.
Event processing is complementary to SOA
SOA is an approach to modelling your business, and hence IT, as a set of reusable activities or services. Services are then orchestrated or composed into coarser services, processes or application. SOA communication is typically (or perhaps narrowly understood to be) implemented as request/response pattern.
Event processing adds an asynchronous pattern to SOA components and services. These patterns are complementary. Services can emit events and consume events. The event processing itself is performed as an extended capability of an ESB.
Conclusion
Event processing, and especially business event processing, begins to deliver on the "Utopian ideals" of real-time analytics and business-configured processing.
This is big ... and it going to get a lot bigger.
