Event Processing for Business

Organizing the Real-Time Enterprise

David C. Luckham

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118171851
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Informationsmanagement

Find out how Events Processing (EP) works and how it can work for you

Business Event Processing: An Introduction and Strategy Guide thoroughly describes what EP is, how to use it, and how it relates to other popular information technology architectures such as Service Oriented Architecture.

• Explains how sense and response architectures are being applied with tremendous results to businesses throughout the world and shows businesses how they can get started implementing EP
• Shows how to choose business event processing technology to suit your specific business needs and how to keep costs of adopting it down
• Provides practical guidance on how EP is best integrated into an overall IT strategy and how its architectural styles differ from more conventional approaches

This book reveals how to make the most advantageous use of event processing technology to develop real time actionable management information from the events flowing through your company's networks or resulting from your business activities. It explains to managers and executives what it means for a business enterprise to be event-driven, what business event processing technology is, and how to use it.

CHAPTER 1

Event Processing and the Survival of the Modern Enterprise

All the world’s information is at your fingertips—but can you make use of it?

—Vinton Cerf, 2005

You probably think that every twenty-first-century enterprise uses events and event processing in its business operations. That would seem obvious, given our information-driven world, which is inundated with sources of events from just about everywhere. But you would be wrong! The truth is that a lot of businesses think they use event processing. And, yes, a lot of them do—in their network management and communications. A few businesses go further and use event processing to drive some of their operations, such as supply chain management or consumer relations. And then there are the electronic stock trading and online gaming industries, both of which are totally event driven, but those are niche markets for event processing.

Many times, it turns out on closer inspection that businesses could make much greater use of the events already at their disposal in their business operations and planning. They could do a lot more with today’s event processing technology than they currently do to improve the running of the enterprise, their awareness of the business environment, and consequently their business decision making—and it would benefit them greatly in terms of their competitiveness and profitability if they did. Indeed, for some of them, adopting the latest event processing technology in their intelligence gathering and business planning may become a matter of survival.

This book has four goals:

• Firstly, to explain the concepts of event processing and to answer basic questions such as “what do you mean by an event?”
• Secondly, to describe strategies for applying event processing in business and enterprise management, not only to run business operations but also as a tool for business intelligence and a basis for planning
• Thirdly, to describe the progress and probable limitations of commercial event processing technology
• Finally, to explore some of the future trends in event processing and its pervasive supporting role in very large–scale information systems

We include a short survey of how event processing has been a basis for different technology areas from discrete event simulation to business process management over the past sixty years. This gives some background about the multiple roles event processing is playing nowadays in everything from weather forecasting to operating a business or running a government.

The final chapter outlines some of the longer-term developments in event processing technology and the roles it will eventually play in the information infrastructure of our society. Many future applications are quite easily predicted now, and the only surprises are in finding out how long they will take to actually happen!

Four Basic Questions about Events

Here are four questions that every CIO, CTO, and business manager should have an answer to:

1. What are events and which ones are important?

2. Why invest in event processing?

3. What are the main concepts in event processing?

4. What kinds of enterprises have bought into event processing technology so far?

These are pretty basic questions—but they’re the kinds of first questions people often ask when they’re wondering if event processing has anything to offer them or their business.

What Are Events and Which Ones Are Important?

An event is simply something that happens. That’s the common sense meaning, the one in the dictionary. We’ll deal with the technical computer processing meaning later. Of course there are many indicators of events. Anything like a message on a news wire service, an email, a sensor signal, a text message, or a newspaper report can indicate an event that has happened.

Events come in all sizes. Some are small events, like getting a text message on cell phone, and others are very big events, like World War II. Historians tend to write about big events, but we live day to day by small events!

Business events are the events that affect our businesses. Those are the kinds of events that concern us here. Now, there is great disagreement as to which events are business events, and even more disagreement as to which events are the most important. To illustrate the contentious nature of business events, here is the top ten in TheStreet.com’s list of the top 100 U.S. business events in the twentieth century, published in May 1999:1

1. Eisenhower creates the interstates: June 29, 1956.

2. Intel invents the single-chip microprocessor: 1971.

3. The Federal Reserve is formed: 1913.

4. The Great Crash of 1929: October 24–29, 1929.

5. Equal pay for equal work: June 10, 1963.

6. Ford introduces the assembly line: 1913.

7. Kaiser’s World War II shipyards surpass all expectations of production: 1942.

8. The first Wal-Mart opens: 1962.

9. The current bull market begins: August 1982.

10. Carrier Engineering is founded, beginning the commercialization of air conditioning: 1915.

And, just in case you agree with all of these top ten, which is very doubtful, try to guess number eleven (don’t look!).2 Obviously, an event remains an event, something that happened. But its importance can vary over time, because importance is a subjective measure and relative to what else happens. For example, number 9, “The current bull market begins: August 1982,” would have to be reworded nowadays as “the 1980s bull market,” because that bull market was replaced by a recession, and then another market about which the experts disagree. Perhaps “the 1980s bull market” would no longer make the top hundred!

Events have attributes, such as the time at which they happened, how long they took to happen, and which events caused which other events. Attributes (such as timing) and relationships between events (such as causality) are important clues used in processing events to judge which ones are most important “right now” for the business. We’ll deal with attributes and event relationships in Chapter 3.

To illustrate how an event’s effects, such as causing other events, can increase its importance, consider for a moment this event from TheStreet.com’s top 100 U.S. business events:

42. The Jungle is published: 1906.

Why on earth is the publication of a novel by Upton Sinclair considered an important event in U.S. business?

Well, Sinclair wrote this novel to highlight the plight of the working class and to remove from obscurity the corruption of the American meatpacking industry in Chicago during the early twentieth century:

Upton Sinclair originally intended to expose “the inferno of exploitation [of the typical American factory worker at the turn of the 20th Century],” but the reading public instead fixated on food safety as the novel’s most pressing issue. In fact, Sinclair bitterly admitted his celebrity rose, “not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.” Their efforts, coupled with the public outcry, led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act (1906, amended, 1967) and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Bureau of Chemistry that would become in 1930, the Food and Drug Administration.3

So, event number 42, the publication of a novel, had far-reaching and permanent effects upon American society and the regulation of its businesses by the government.

However, Figure 1.1 illustrates that an event’s causal effects can be temporary or may be superseded by later events. Of course, looking back at an event’s causal effects is interesting, but for a modern business it is much more important to predict likely causal effects in the future of events—maybe several events—that are happening now! More on this later.

FIGURE 1.1 “Up three points,” by Frank Hanley, January 10, 1930

Source: www.archelaus-cards.com/blog/2009/01/12/the-great-depression-in-cartoons-part-1-1929-30/

Why Invest in Event Processing?

Events are carriers of instant information. And event processing is about having the ability to take instant action. Sometimes the usefulness of the information events carry is short lived. Putting events in databases for action tomorrow is yesterday’s mode of doing business.

Events are arriving all the time from a multitude of sources. This is the era of the real-time event.4 Our businesses, our transportation systems, and our government agencies depend upon all manner of events. Some examples are:

• Internet messages
• Stock market feeds
• Online reports from the company’s departments
• Customer orders and enquiries on the business’s website or by phone
• Cell phone text messages
• GPS tracking updates from a delivery truck fleet
• RFID tag readings from sensors in inventory and shipping
• Satellite-based location feeds from aircraft navigation systems

and many hundreds of other sources of events. All kinds of events are arriving continuously and driving our businesses. Often a business must react immediately to the events it receives just to keep the daily operations moving. So why not explore other ways to make use of them?

Events run our personal lives too! When we go home after a hard day’s business there are all the traffic events that we have to put up with. We process those events right then—when they happen—to decide which route to take going home. And at home there’s the evening news, weather reports, and even more events. Moreover, these events depend upon other event sources. Weather reports, for example, depend upon satellite communications, radio signals from deep ocean buoys, automated weather stations, and much else. It’s an event-active world that we live in.

Whatever the business, many different kinds of events happening “right now” have an impact ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Event Processing and the Survival of the Modern Enterprise
• Chapter 2: Sixty Years of Event Processing
• Chapter 3: First Concepts in Event Processing
• Chapter 4: The Rise of Commercial Event Processing
• Chapter 5: Markets and Emerging Markets for CEP
• Chapter 6: Patterns of Events
• Chapter 7: Making Sense of Chaos in Real Time: Part 1
• Chapter 8: Making Sense of Chaos in Real Time: Part 2
• Chapter 9: The Future of Event Processing
• Appendix: Glossary of Terminology: The Event Processing Technical Society: (EPTS) Glossary of Terms—Version 2.0
• Alphabetical List of Glossary Terms
• Glossary of Terms
• Glossary According to Lexicographic Order (definitions only)
• About the Author
• Index