Behold the zebra in the wild savanna -- when a it senses the presence of a lion, it knows to run away, as fast as it can. When it senses food supplies, it knows to act.
Do today's companies have this much situational awareness, and an ability to act quickly to survive and thrive? Not yet, but thanks to new approaches such as complex event processing, they're getting there, according to Gartner VP Roy Schulte. "We can teach computers to do what a zebra does," Roy said. "To collect and process event data to respond quickly and effectively."
In his keynote kicking off ebizQ's recent Event Processing virtual conference, Schulte broke down the essential pieces of complex event processing, and describing how businesses can leverage CEP, or being able to act, in real time, on multiple streams of event data flowing in from different parts of the enterprise. "The value of complex event processing, overall, can be summarized as improving situation awareness. Simply put, that is just knowing what is going on, so you can figure out what to do." The benefits of complex event processing, Schulte said, include better decision quality, faster response times, reduced information glut, and reduced costs.
Schulte defined a business event as a "meaningful change in a state that is something that is relevant to the business. Examples include depositing or withdrawing money from a bank, submitting a purchase order, or hiring an employee." There is also a second term, "event object," that describes how the event is packaged for processing, typically as an XML document these days. "We have to record events using event objects so computers can receive them and do computations on those events," Schulte said.
However, while all companies have always been event driven -- with millions, if not billions, of events in a single day, most events are still handled manually, by people, not computers. "At any one second, a large company has on its network anywhere from 10,000 to 10 billion business events," Schulte explained. "At the low end, that's almost a billion events per day -- at the high end, that’s almost a trillion events per day."
The challenge is that most of the stovepiped and legacy applications that power enterprises are not yet event driven, Schulte observes.
But there's great practicality in automating the ability to capture and make decisions on multiple event streams coming into the core business systems, Schulte says. "For example, you can have a complex event that says, ‘this mornings sales were 30% above our daily average.' That of course is much easier to digest and act on than sending a person 500 detailed sales records, and making the person compute what happened that day manually."
The growing array of sensors, such as RFID tags, combined with front-end systems such as business activity monitoring (BAM) dashboards make complex event processing a reality with today's technology, Schulte points out.
"In many cases, the complex event processing system Is just a front end being used for decision support. The output of the CEP engine is sent to a person through a BAM dashboard, or through an alert such as email or SMA or an Atom or RSS feed. in this case, we have a two-stage computation. In the first stage we’re using a computer to narrow down the data. And in the second stage, we still have a person involved to do the final analysis."An application system, or some other device or some other system, detects the event, and generates a message or a notification that is sent to a person. That notification is the event object or event report sent in the form of a message through message-oriented middleware, RSS, a Web service, or an email, or some other communication mechanism. The response to an event may be a manual activity, done by a person or it may be a SOA service or business process or some other application."
However, things could get interesting as CEP systems develop, Schulte added. Namely, the need for human processing could be taken out of the equation all together. "We can bypass that person entirely; we can build enough smarts into the complex event processing engine to determine the specific response that is needed."
Schulte provided a working example of complex event processing in action within the airline industry:
"In large airlines, there is an event oriented middleware that... acts as an enterprise nervous system. Information from hundreds of sources, including sensors on board the aircraft, information coming in from the FAA, and information coming in from standard systems is sent to the enterprise nervous system, and is temporarily stored in event databases. It helps to create the data, the outgoing alerts and notifications that is sent to hundreds of applications on the consuming side to respond to threat and opportunity situations as they emerge. By having information quickly, each of these systems in their respective departments can respond faster. ...Information helps the fueling and maintenance management applications to change their schedules and so forth. By using an event based system, the turnaround time of each plane can be shortened… Fewer airplanes are needed to handle the same schedule."
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