vincent
Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:34:43 +0000
The recent InfoQ conference in London had some interesting banking sessions on high volume / low latency (implying event processing). These included Merrill Lynch on monitoring messages, and Betfair on their online betting system. One can be pretty sure there is CEP in production in these organizations; Merrill’s talk was about monitoring messages or events, which seems to be a popular CEP application area (for TIBCO CEP in any case).
Scenarios for “message monitoring” include:

• I have some high value events occuring that represent control messages for my internal systems. The value of these messages, and the requirement to be aware of any potential problems immediately, means I must monitor them end-to-end to deduce possible failure (events) in a timely manner. This is a classic “sense and respond” application for CEP.
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• I have some high value events representing the arrival of important documents in my (managed) business process. The value of these documents, and the requirement to be aware of any potential problems immediately, means I must monitor them end-to-end in my workflow to ensure that the appropriate service levels are met (from the document managament, as opposed to process management, perspective). This is a classic “situation awareness” application for CEP.
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In both these cases, we need to monitor the events and use rules (and the state of the entities being monitored) to deduce if all is well or of some complex business event [*1] has occured that requires attention. The CEP engine manages the state and rules and event channels.
Notes:
[1] Talking of business events, there is an ongoing marketing onslaught from IBM promoting “Business Events” for their new CEP acquisition (versus TIBCO BusinessEvents, er, the original-named product). Somehow, this reminds one of the Lord Of The Rings: the searchlight from IBM’s Marketing Tower has swept across the IT plains and stopped at CEP: now the blue hordes are trying to rename CEP for their own (dark?) purposes… .


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