On CICS event processing

Recently, IBM has announced "CICS Event Processing". A full presentation explaining what it is about, is available on the Web. As I have written many times in the past, the processing part of events is just a part of a bigger picture, that includes: producing the events before the processing, route the events to the right processing elements, and consuming the events by consumers. In some cases, devising the event processing application is the easier part of the work, and the more difficult part is to connect it to the rest of the world. Since a substantial amount of the world transactions are going through CICS, which is a rather old, but still alive and kicking transaction processor, then it makes good sense to take it as a place for instrumentation, and emit events that can be sent either to further processing or directly to a consumer or a dashboard. The event processing part of CICS perform simple and mediated event processing, e.g. filtering, transformation, enrichment and routing. For pattern matching it sends the event to an event processing engine. I think that we'll see more of the producer side event processing support, that will reduce the need to write ad-hoc adapters and make it more cost-effective to use. We'll also see the complementary part - the consumer side, on which I'll write in a later date.