Sunday, February 3, 2008

On Event Processing and Now.



After some more technical postings, back to macro-level issue. David Luckham has written recently in his website about the history of CEP (I'll refer to the content of this article in another posting). All indications are the event processing is not a new thing, however, as some people indicate, there are a lot of interest, events, maybe hype around it NOW - the question is what is new ?



The first observation is that unlike the past, today there are commercial "on the shelf" products whose main purpose is to provide event processing capabilities, while in the past there were event processing capabilities in other types of products (simulation, databases, network and system management, middleware, real-time systems etc..), there is also a start of event processing as a discipline. What are the reasons for the interest now - some of what happened in the last few years that supported the shift from hard-coded event processing functionality to COTS are (based on discussions with people in multiple industries):
  • Some contemporary applications which are event-driven by nature - such as: compliance with regulations, the need to detect frauds as two examples - have become pervasive in multiple industries
  • The increasing complexity of inter-process integration that is simplified with event-driven interaction
  • The need for flexibility and agility to gain market advantage in different areas - thus, move away from hard-coded solutions.
  • The substantial growth in the number of available events - e.g. since RFID technology became pervasive.
  • Some industry trends like - BAM, RTE, "on demand" - that are also based on responding to events.
  • The drive to save expenses in back offices by automating exception handling - trends like STP.

I am sure that there are more of these.

Thus, while event processing functionality is not new - "event processing" as a first class citizen in the computing world - with its own dedicated products, community and emerging discipline is new. More - Later

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