Business Transformation in Action

No we're not talking about political correctness or personal computing, though these both could easily measure into the equation. Rather, PC -- or more appropriately, PC-cubed -- is the set of factors that need to be considered when looking into the viability of complex event processing.

The grand finale for latest SOA in Action conference was a joint presentation by the dynamic team of Roy Schulte (Gartner), Dr. Mani Chandy (CalTech), and Frank Chisolm (IBM). The three made the case for event processing as an important initiative for businesses seeking to remain competitive in the years ahead.

The takeaway from the session was that complex event processing requires continuous streams of information from multiple sources. The good news is that CEP need not be so complex, and, in fact, over the next few years, systems that sense and respond to events will be as commonplace as business intelligence systems are today.

Mani, considered one of the early visionaries of complex event processing, said the "PC-cubed" formula (three Ps and three Cs) will drive CEP forward over the next few years:

• Price - The price of managing data sources will continue to drop.
• Pervasiveness - Sensors, such as mobile phones, have become pervasive.
• Performance - "Enterprises have access to immense computing power that can be harnessed through event processing," Mani says. And now, "parallel, distributed, and cloud computing create ideal environments for event processing."

• Celerity - "Businesses and consumers demand swift action," Mani points out. "You expect to be notified immediately if your plane is late."
• Connectedness - The world is more interconnected. Your company may need to respond immediately to an earthquake in China, a flood in India. Event processing applications help detect events all over the globe."
• Complexity - "Businesses have become more complex, and expect IT to help with increasingly complex problems."

Roy cautioned, event processing capabilities don't just automatically pop up, even among companies with the most advanced BI infrastructures. "The way you get your systems to be more smart fast and agile is by having the systems designed correctly, and in most cases that means more use of the event processing design methodology," he says.  "You can't just take a conventionally designed system and just speed it up to accomplish the goals that people want to do."

While the technology now exists to build CEP, the methodology requires a different mindset among companies. "The limitation that we have today is that there are not enough people around who understand how to design systems that operate in this fashion," Roy says. "They don't understand continuoius intelligence or complex event processing."

Mani Chandy and Roy Schulte have just puiblished a new book on the subject, entitled "Event Processing - Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies."