Modern event processing techniques vital
Gartner believes companies must adopt more modern methods
In an era of accelerating business processes and exploding volumes of digital event data, companies must master the art of event processing if they are to thrive or even survive, according to Gartner.
Gartner explains how to implement modern event processing systems in the recently released book “Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies”, published by McGraw Hill. Roy Schulte, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, and K. Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, are co-authors of the book.
“It’s a familiar story: the pace of business has increased, the world is changing faster, and competition is getting tougher,” said Schulte. “These business pressures have inspired the development of numerous modern management strategies with the net result that the world is awash with advice on why your company needs to be more responsive and adaptable. It’s now time to move on to the more important discussion of how to actually do it. Smart devices, sense-and-respond systems and situation awareness depend on getting the maximum value from business event data.”
If EDA is the first big idea on which event processing is based, then event-driven complex-event processing (CEP) is the second. Event-driven CEP is a way of distilling the information value from many incoming, simpler ‘base’ business events into a few more-useful, summary-level ‘complex’ events. In this way it helps companies achieve situation awareness to be able to make better and faster decisions.
“Event-driven CEP is a kind of near real-time business intelligence (BI), a way of ‘connecting the dots’ to detect threats and opportunities,” explained Schulte. “By contrast, conventional BI is time-driven or request-driven. Complex events may be reactive, summarizing past events or predictive, identifying things that are likely to happen based on what has happened recently compared with historical patterns.”
