Four Questions About Event-Driven Architecture, Answered

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November 25, 2007

Four Questions About Event-Driven Architecture, Answered

As part of my recent industry experts podcast series for InfoWorld, I explored the emerging trend toward Event-Driven Architecture, and how it fit into SOA as we know it today.

Below are some of the pressing questions about EDA, and the answers provided by experts in the podcasts:

Why should we care about EDA, and what will EDA do for SOA-based organizations?

Oracle’s Dave Chappell says as an SOA is formed, it creates a collective network capable “of receiving asynchronous communications operating as an autonomous unit of work, and then feeding results back into the collective network. That collective network becomes this live stream of events that are constantly communicating information about your live business as it's happening. And then there are technologies such as complex event-processing engines that can tap into those live streams of events and look for a complex or sophisticated patterns and then report that up to a high level business function to make something meaningful out of it.”

As a result, end users can “gain real-time insight into your business as its happening and make real-time decision and course corrections along the way. The analogy I like to make is not only can you see that you're losing a million dollars an hour, you can also do something about it in a real-time fashion.”

(Download the full interview with Dave Chappell here.)

Is EDA a separate initiative from SOA, or is it an extension of mature SOA environments?

BEA's Theo Beack finds that EDA is an extension of SOA. “What we found is that the interest really comes from those customers that have more the real-time type of environment and are quite mature in their SOA strategies and implementations,” he says. “EDA then becomes a natural extension of this, of the existing work that they've done over the last three, four, five years.” EDA projects will take time, just as SOA projects have, Theo says. “As we saw with SOA over the last three or four years, customers are taking a very methodical approach. They really know that there's risk involved with implementing and doing something brand new that they have to learn this learning curve that they have to go through, they have to really familiarize themselves with concept, technologies and so forth.”

How difficult is EDA to implement?

David Nichols of Accenture says EDA fits very neatly into emerging SOAs infrastructures. “The nice thing and the appealing thing about event driven architectures is you can address this early in the architecture deployment, or sometime in the future with very little disruption to the existing architecture that’s in place.” Nichols says that he’s involved on SOA efforts that do not yet include EDA, but these projects will be quickly adaptable to EDA when the time comes. “The foundation is clearly laid without too much disruption to address and implement event driven architecture sometime in the future. We believe this will eventually be a very large component of most SOA-based solutions.”

How long will the transition to EDA take for most organizations?

As with the transition from JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services) to SOA, EDA is a gradual process that will occur over the course of several years.

Hub Vandevoort of Progress Software says SOA is undergoing the same transition as personal computers underwent from DOS to Windows. “That took about a decade to happen,” Hub says. “It wasn't until 1995, more or less, that programmers were completely comfortable with the idea of the Windows programming model. The tools that evolved, the component models were rich, the libraries were extensive and now, every programmer programs that way. But it was a ten-year transition.”

SOA is undergoing the same transition, Hub points out, which is “exactly the same metaphorical shift from command and control-oriented, interactive SOA to more event-driven SOA. That shift will take place over ten years, but will result in the same kind of quantum leap that the Windows shift did.”

(Download the full podcast interview with Hub Vandervoort here.)

These podcasts were part of this fall's SOA Executive Forum, produced by InfoWorld. ebizQ, in cooperation with InfoWorld, has published a special supplement on SOA: Building a Foundation for Continuous Change. The report features interviews with the industry’s top practitioners to reveal the best practices, customer case studies and industry surveys that you can use to transform you tactical SOA systems into the right strategic mix of governance, and integration with complementary technologies like BPM that will increase the depths and directions of your business agility.

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Posted by: Archiworld at November 28, 2007 03:41 AM