What's All the Buzz About Event Processing? A Talk With BEA's Ruma Sanyal - Twenty-Four Seven Security

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April 29, 2008
What's All the Buzz About Event Processing? A Talk With BEA's Ruma Sanyal

***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 6:27 minute podcast below:

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What follows is a transcript of my podcast with Ruma Sanyal, Director of Worldwide Product Marketing for BEA's WebLogic Time and Event Driven Products, where Ruma explains all the buzz about Event Processing, how Event Processing works with SOA, BPM, and other implementations, and finally, how someone can get started with Event Processing.

Can you give me a quick overview of what Complex Event Processing is?

Sure. The straightforward definition of Complex Event Processing is as follows: Complex Event Processing correlates events into patterns that may present a threat or opportunity. Typically, processing vast amounts of data in real time. So although this is a great starting definition, I do want to add some color to that.

We prefer using the term “Event Processing” at least at BEA and when we speak with customers to refer to this area. We have found that in our discussions with customers and prospects that the term “Complex Event Processing” often conjures up images that it is a complex technology or the events involved have to be complex, etc.

So event processing we have found, is the term that is becoming popular as the umbrella term to describe simple event processing, which is events at a time with or without mediation, event driven architecture, event processing in the context of SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, and Business Process Management, BPM. As well as high performance often mission critical event processing, which is called “Complex Event Processing”, which is also perhaps the most interesting type of event processing and almost always the ultimate goal of any type of event processing.

So let's focus on this type of event processing for a minute. Typically, this includes high volumes of continuously or 'burstilly' streaming events that are of consequential to business, emanating from within, and are outside the business. These events from various sources have to be filtered, aggregated, correlated in real-time into a pattern that may represent a threat or opportunity to the business.

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

After that, a business process management system, or a custom application, or a human being might take an action to respond appropriately. Complex Event Processing systems need very special capabilities, ability to handle an order of magnitude highest performance in throughput, processing, and an ability to respond in real-time.

So CEP, typically, is the upstream capability that is sensing events coming in. And once filtered and aggregated, these get funneled to other systems. So the performance has to be off the higher order.

And it seems like everywhere you look nowadays, you see something about Complex Event Processing. Why all this buzz?

Sure. The volume of data bombarding an enterprise is increasing exponentially. So Gartner estimates that today a large enterprise is being hit with 10,000 to ten million events per second. Network bandwidths are not constrained any more, transaction volumes have increased tremendously, new types of transactions and interactions are emerging so you need to be able to handle tremendous amount of data.

Now, if you look at it from a slightly different angle from a technology evolution perspective, about 50% of the enterprises are well underway in their SOA implementation, another 40% have specific plans. Once all these services get invoked at the various layers of the enterprise, there will be tremendous amounts of data flowing through the enterprise backplane and event processing is the only technology, reasonable technology and cost effective technology that can take advantage of that.

So that's sort of from the supply side of data. And then from the demand side, couple that with the fact that customers and markets are becoming increasingly impatient in terms of standard of service and how service needs to continuously improve. A very simple example of that is expectations around overnight delivery.

The SLA for that has increased tremendously. Also, the final kicker is cost containment. Feeling the heat of globalization, enterprises are increasingly focused on cost and CEP is the only technology that can address the data volume and the response time issues that I just referred to without putting in place really costly homegrown solutions.

Now, does this mean customers implementing SOA, or BPM, or BAM, or integration, do they have to start all over again?

Oh no, they don't, not at all. We have conducted a primary market research survey in fall of 2007 with, in fact, ebizQ, you guys, asking people about their event processing implementation goals. And of the 450 respondents, 70% said that they have implementation plans with their SOA, BPM, or BAM projects for event processing. This is absolutely the right approach.

Event processing is not a rip and replace technology but complementary to SOA and BPM. And as far as BAM is concerned, it is one of the first and foremost applications, you know, that uses applications as leveraging event processing. If you talk to Gartner's Roy Schulte, he will concur. Also, BAM is very complementary and almost required for a BPM implementation.

So you can see how these are all sort of tied together and they should all be thought of as complementary technologies coexisting with each other and interfacing with each other.

Excellent. So how does someone get started with event processing?

So I sort of have a three-pronged advice. Here's sort of my advice based on what I've seen that works well with customers. Number one, think about your business with an event limb, think about events, their sources, their consumers, and things of that nature. Then number two, if you are implementing a SOA or a BPM project, think about which part of it lends well to event processing.

Are parts of some of your business process going to benefit from real-time information and real-time action? I think absolutely. Your challenge is to identify those. Can your services be represented as events and do they need to be? The answer in certain cases is absolutely. And then number three, identify a small project.

Typically, I have seen what really works well is a BAM implementation. Say for a particular business function like your sales order, implement event processing for such a project and prove success to the rest of the organization; it's that easy.