The Business Benefits of Event Processing: A Talk With Websphere's Paul MacKay - Twenty-Four Seven Security

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April 30, 2008
The Business Benefits of Event Processing: A Talk With Websphere's Paul MacKay

***Editor's Note: If you are interested in the fast developing world of Event Processing, then do not miss the first ever virtual conference on Event Processing taking place at ebizQ right here!

Listen to or download the 3:01 minute podcast below:

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What follows is a transcript of my podcast with Paul MacKay, worldwide sales leader of IBM’s WebSphere, where we discuss event processing: what it is, how it can benefit your business, and finally, the role event processing plays in SOA.

First of all, why don’t you give me a quick overview of what Business Event Processing is.

Well, Peter, Business Event Processing is really a software technology that provides the ability to sense when electronic signals indicating an actionable business situations have occurred and to coordinate the right response at the right time.

Now, exactly what is the benefit of Business Event Processing?

Well, Business Event Processing provides tremendous benefit in that it enables real-time patterns of events coming from disparate sources throughout a corporate infrastructure to be detected and to be evaluated and acted upon. But in addition to that, what Business Event Processing does is it abstracts the level at which the specification of these patterns are formed making it possible for business personnel themselves to take responsibility for designing, deploying and maintaining their own Business Event Processing patterns, that’s the real benefit.

The real benefit results in the much more rapid time to market, and much more rapid response to change, and empowering the business user to be able to take responsibility for the implementation of its own Business Event Processing needs.

Make sure to catch Paul MacKay's Keynote Presentation at ebizQ's Event Processing virtual conference right here!

I can certainly see how companies would be interested in something like that. Now, what exact role does Business Event Processing play in SOA?

Well, SOA focuses on the user’s view of a system at a conceptual level. SOA is really an extension of Object-Oriented Programming ideas, the principle of modularity, the design of an organization of the related services into a single service server module. So it relates services into groups of server modules. And event processing is a completely different ability.

Event processing is at the level of business events now entering the picture with a conceptual paradigm for remote access. A user no longer needs to access a service. Instead, a user can access services by sending and receiving events asynchronously. So they’re really complimentary, completely complementary paradigms doing completely different things. And together event processing and Service Oriented Architecture cover the entire waterfront of businesses needs.