Keynote...

Notes from Roy Schulte’s session on Event Processing.

The big key here is that Gartner are positioning EDA and Client Server (Request/Response) as subsets of SOA. We use many of the same concepts (standards based, abstracted, etc.) in both of the models. Event Driven Architecture is, however, better placed for situational awareness. Much of what Roy had to say was around the handling of Complex Events – typically described as aggregations of simpler events. He also made the key observation that an event stream can, of course, kick off a number of action streams. Using an airline example where as a result of some event data being received a whole raft of operational processes is triggered – from scheduling catering to preparing the ramp.

It is also clear from Roy’s remarks that even though we had the message oriented movements of the 90s, Event processing is still emerging. The usual innovators (financial institutions especially) have jumped onto this paradigm because of a combination of regulatory needs and some major competitive advantage in an environment when market analysis in milliseconds is now the norm.

BAM – Business Activity Monitoring leading to “real time BI” or genuine situational awareness is fast becoming a real possibility when event processing approaches are applied.