Tim Bass
Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:49:13 +0000

The other day I discussed CEP in Layman’s Terms: Reuse and Agility. Today, our topic is CEP and transparency. One of the major benefits of “white box” event processing solutions is transparency, something not readily available or obvious in black-box solutions.
Friend and colleague John Bates, Progress Apama, often discusses the benefits of white-box algorithmic trading platforms in terms of increased time-to-market and other competitive advantages. I agree with John and would like to point out that there is another key benefit, in simple layman’s terms, transparency.
For example, let’s say you have designed an event processing solution for operational risk management (ORM). It is time for your favorite auditors to come by and they wish to take a look at what is going on with that proprietary black-box ORM applications running quietly in the server room.
The nice auditors ask you, “What does that application do?” and you reply “Well, it looks for evidence of insider trading,” and they ask “Do you mind if we ask how?” and you respond “Good question, do you mind to wait a moment while I get you the contact the vendor because we don’t have access to the source code or the actual key indicators?”
Now, let’s look at the white-box scenario:
Again, the nice auditors ask you, “What does that application do?” and you reply “Well, it looks for evidence of insider trading,” and they ask “Do you mind if we ask how?” and you respond “Yes, sit down and we will pull up our insider trading key indicator (KI) models. These models are stored in XML format and viewable in our graphical KI design studio. We can print out the KI models for insider trading if you like!” and the smiling auditor says “Thank you, your system is much more transparent than the last place we visited!”
This scenario also applies in looking for why certain KIs were not detected that should have been; or when performing a root cause analysis to see why the KI you used in your wrong business decision was inaccurate.
So, CEP in layman’s terms is what we might refer to as the ART of event processing:

• Agility
• Reuse
• Transparency

Please feel free to reuse these ideas, but don’t forget to reference the author and this blog
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