Decisions and Complex Event Processing

by  Claye Greene, Principal Consultant, Technology Blue, Inc.

Complex event processing (CEP) continually evolves as a technology to help organizations react to various business conditions such as threats and market opportunities. CEP technologies excel at taking raw, voluminous amounts of event data, accumulating it, correlating it and aggregating it in forms that facilitate critical decision-making.

Events are simply something that happens within a company: a point of sale purchase, a dip below minimum quantity threshold in a warehouse or a fraudulent credit card transaction. Equally important, events can represent something that doesn’t happen: no sales for a product within a given time frame, or no response from an online CRM session for more than 5 minutes. All of these examples give cause for managing real-time events, and equally as important, making well-informed decisions what to do about them. ….

….Within the context of CEP there are commonly two types of decisioning – manual and automated. The former sends processed event data to a dashboard for manual decisioning by a business resource – perhaps initiating product orders or kicking off another business process. The latter is the focal point of this paper – automated decisioning entities that are called by the CEP engine to perform some action. Article