The latest generation of service oriented architecture
(SOA) technology could help IT departments meet demands for
business process monitoring systems that can combine information in
real time.
One of the main benefits of an SOA running across the business
is that different IT systems can be monitored simultaneously to
discover complex patterns of events occurring within business
processes, such as when a customer makes an online purchase and
changes their address. Analysts believe SOAs could provide a simple
way to solve the issues of complexity and immediacy, which have
previously required vast amounts of programming.
The latest generation of SOA technology features complex event
processing (CEP), which could provide a solution to the issue of
managing complex simultaneous occurrences.
CEP offers IT directors a way to detect and manage the events
that happen in the organisation. According to analyst firm Butler
Group, the objectives of CEP are to assist with the understanding
of the events found in the enterprise and to provide techniques to
help improve event handling.
"Only when there is a full appreciation of what is occurring, or
about to happen, can planning commence and action be taken," said
Mark Blowers, senior research analyst at Butler Group.
The challenge for users is that current systems and
infrastructure are not flexible enough to meet the constantly
changing demands of the organisation.
"Supporting the real-time enterprise needs a dynamic and agile
infrastructure based on SOA, combined with efficient event handling
capabilities that can quickly and automatically provide information
about incidents taking place for interested processes, services,
applications and middleware," said Blowers.
"Organisations need to respond quickly to changing circumstances
and be made aware of new opportunities and threats. This
information usually becomes apparent through an event or, in many
cases, multiple scheduled and unscheduled events. What happens to
the enterprise on a daily basis has an impact on all aspects of the
enterprise's operation."
CEP can be embedded into production processes or be part of a
business activity monitoring application. Either way, the
technology can help an organisation react more quickly to business
events.
Business activity monitoring concerns the aggregation,
analysis and presentation of relevant and timely information about
business activities inside organisations and involving customers
and partners.
However, some analysts believe that business activity monitoring
is still maturing as a technology and not ready for monitoring
SOAs.
Henry Peyret, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said, "Users
cite the need to collect performance management data from numerous
places and aggregate this in dashboards as a fundamental
requirement. A number of suppliers have announced enhancements and
partnerships, demonstrating a willingness to open up their business
activity monitoring strategies to an SOA world, but they will need
standards definition and more integration capabilities before they
can truly claim that business activity monitoring is ready for
SOA."
According to Peyret, "Early business activity monitoring project
implementations have revealed significant user frustration. The
available products are too tightly linked to technologies such as
business process management or business intelligence and are not
open enough to support a SOA strategy."
Nevertheless, open web services standards for SOAs designed to
facilitate CEP activities are being developed.
A lot of work is being done around messaging and event
management. For example, the web services standards for messaging
(WS- Reliable Messaging), notifications (WS-Notification and
WS-Topics), monitoring and management (WS-DM), events
(WS-Eventing), security (WS-Security) and orchestration (WS-BPel)
are in the process of being defined and ratified.
As businesses continue to function at internet speed, CEP is
becoming more of an issue. Fortunately, there is no lack of
technologies to help record, manage, and analyse these simultaneous
business events.
For example, a standard such as WS-Notification has broad
support from the likes of SAP, Hewlett-Packard, Tibco and IBM and
can harness the power and flexibility of web services to help users
manage their businesses at a granular level.
The next step
Event management technology can link into the enterprise service
bus (ESB), a software layer that unites applications, such as human
resources systems, accounts systems and datawarehouses. It
addresses the intersection of message oriented middleware and web
services.
The main ESB products are IBM Websphere Business Integration,
Sonic ESB, and webMethods' enterprise services platform Fiorano
ESB.
In a report Anne Thomas Manes, research director at analyst firm
Burton Group, said the boundary between ESBs and web services
management (WSM) products is blurred. WSM suppliers include Blue
Titan, and SOA Software. BEA Systems plans to merge ESB and WSM
functions into its Quicksilver technology.
"ESB products provide seamless interoperability with established
message oriented middleware protocols such as IBM Websphere MQ,
Tibco Rendezvous and Sonic Software SonicMQ," said Thomas
Manes.
"Meanwhile, the super-platform suppliers (such as BEA, IBM,
Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) and other web services platform
suppliers are adding ESB functionality to their systems based on
the interoperable WS-Reliable Messaging specification.
"Once WS-Reliable Messaging and other key web services framework
standards are universally implemented, the need for proprietary ESB
protocol stacks will wither away."
CEP can pay off for investment services, says
Gartner
Complex event processing (CEP) systems targeted at the
investment services industry hold promise for firms struggling with
the increasing speed of business and the growing amount of
real-time data, according to analyst firm Gartner.
In a paper on the subject, Gartner principal analyst Mary Knox
said CEP could aid algorithmic trading, trade routing, service
level monitoring, real-time risk management, fraud detection and
prevention, and compliance.
Gartner predicts that through 2007, CEP systems will provide a
competitive advantage for investment services firms because they
are able to analyse and react to market events in seconds.
By 2008, Gartner expects CEP to become a competitive requirement
for investment services firms whose strategies rely on rapid
detection and response, changes in risk, or unusual variations in
high-volume and time-sensitive service levels.