The “big elephant in the room” in the ongoing CEP dialog is that most of the current (CEP) software on the market is not capable of machine learning and statistical analysis of dynamic real-time situations. Software vendors have been promoting and selling business process automation solutions and calling this approach “CEP” when, in fact, nothing is new. There is certainly no “technology leap” in these systems, as sold today.
- First, event management is primarily about the identification and generation of business events from the ambient events. Similar to what Carole-Ann and I had written in previous posts.- Second, IBM wants to introduce high level EPLs to express the logic for that processing that are business-centric, something very similar to what Business Rules Languages and approaches are in the business rules management area.
- leave anything related to transport, communication to other layers- use this revised CEP to express and execute event-relevant logic, the purpose of which is to translate the ambient events into relevant business events- have these business events trigger business processes (however lightweight you want to make them)- have these business processes invoke decision services implemented through decision management to decide what they should be doing at every step- have the business processes invoke action services to execute the actions decided by the decision services- all the while generating business events or ambient events- etc.
The success of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has created the foundation for information
and service sharing across application and organizational boundaries. Through the use of SOA,
organizations are demanding solutions that provide vast scalability, increased reusability of
business services, and greater efficiency of computing resources. More importantly,
organizations need agile architectures that can adapt to rapidly changing business requirements
without the long development cycles that are typically associated with these efforts. Event-Driven
Architecture (EDA) has emerged to provide more sophisticated capabilities that address these
dynamic environments. EDA enables business agility by empowering software engineers with
complex processing techniques to develop substantial functionality in days or weeks rather than
months or years. As a result, EDA is positioned to enhance the business value of SOA.
The purpose of this white paper is to describe the approach employed to overcome the significant
technical challenges required to design a dynamic grid computing architecture for a US
government program. The program required optimization of the overall business process while
maximizing scalability to support dramatic increases in throughput. To realize this goal, an
architecture was developed to support the dynamic placement and removal of business services
across the enterprise.
Bruce makes an interesting comment on business rules too: that “routing logic in process gateways” are not “business rules”. That doesn’t really make sense: for sure some gateways will be process-housekeeping decisions of little interest to the business user, but others will surely embed business-critical decisions. On the other hand, it has long been acknowledged that a best practice for BPM is to delegate such business decisions to a managed decision service - hence the explicit new business rule (aka decision) task in BPMN 2.0. And,in the CEP world, for tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents to invoke a decision managed by its Decision Manager tool.
I got an update on the Oracle Business Rules product recently. Oracle is an interesting company - they have the components of decision management but do not yet have them under a single umbrella. For instance, they have in-database data mining (blogged about here), the Real Time Decisions (RTD) engine, event processing rules and so on. Anyway, this update was on business rules.
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J. Llinas, C. Bowman, G. Rogova, A. Steinberg, and F. White. In P. Svensson and J. Schubert (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2004, page 1218--1230. (2004)
R. Bruckner, B. List, and J. Schiefer. DaWaK 2000: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery, page 317--326. London, UK, Springer-Verlag, (2002)