by David Luckham In part 1 we argued that SOA and EDA are complementary architectural design concepts, and that the fusion of the two, event-driven SOA (or ED-SOA) should be the design philosophy of both SOA and EDA today. Now we come to the other two technologies, Business Process Management (BPM) and Complex Event Processing [...]
by Mark Tsimelzon, Coral8 Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines have received a lot of attention lately. Understanding CEP on a high level is easy: a CEP engine is a platform for building and running applications, used to process and analyze large numbers of real-time events. These applications come up in a number of domains: algorithmic [...]
by John Bates, Vice President Apama Products, Progress Software. Algorithmic trading in FX (foreign exchange) is still in the early stages of growth; however there is a growing adoption of algorithmic techniques. A major factor in FX is that each firm has different requirements, so rather than purchasing pre-built ‘black boxes’ – offering packaged trading [...]
BEA‘s acquisition of BPM suite vendor Fuego marks BEA’s formal move into the Business Process Management market – and a direct response to moves already made by rival TIBCO, as well as market positioning by webMethods. The move to BPM by BEA was expected and the choice to acquire Fuego is certainly not a surprise. [...]
Pretty much every sector of commerce is event-driven these days. Time and information are the two driving sources of competitive advantage. As a result managers of event-driven enterprises are becoming increasingly stressed as time to manufacture, time to supply, time to do anything, shrinks, while simultaneously the information tsunami rolls over them.
Business activity monitoring tools are now predicting how your business will be affected by the performance of your IT. Instead of simply alerting you when certain events happen in your enterprise IT layers, they go a step further and predict how those events will impact your high level business processes. This goes well beyond the basic dashboard model for the current generation of BAM tools. It’s a direction that tries to anticipate what you, the consumer of BAM, will ask for next. Obviously, just monitoring for certain events and alerting you when they happen is not going to satisfy you for very long. You will ask for more! And business impact analysis is probably one of the things you might wish for.
BAM vendors have already predicted this, and are working like crazy � building the next version of their tools. These new applications require using aspects of CEP for real time event analysis. In the coming year, 2004-05, the BAM marketplace will offer an increasingly sophisticated array of capabilities targeting risk management, just-in-time inventory control, and business impact analysis.
My previous articles describe our inability to manage real time event-driven enterprises, or make grand eCommerce visions happen, or fully utilize new technologies like RFID. This is due to IT blindness, an inability to understand how patterns of low level events in the IT layers of our enterprises will impact high level business goals, policies [...]
The dashboard model of business activity monitoring (see article) is the basic model for the current generation of BAM tools. The essential idea is that these tools, when configured properly on your IT layers, will alert you when events happen that have significance for your enterprise�s business goals and operations. These tools work by detecting and processing single events from the underlying enterprise IT layer. This is simple event processing. Some tools may let you specify event-condition-action rules that are triggered when significant events happen. This is a step towards automating the real time actions you want to take to manage your enterprise.
Here�s a problem BAM tools should be able to handle fairly soon if the BAM industry continues to develop more powerful event processing capabilities.
In my article, �Avoiding Disasters Waiting to Happen� I gave you the example of an on-line banking website that had been �phished�. This resulted in crooks being able to use stolen identities and passwords to do things that the bank�s legitimate customers never did. Because the bank was IT blind it never detected that its customers were behaving in strange ways � throwing their money away in effect.