IBM Plunges Into ‘Business Event Management,’ Helping Define Field

by Charles Babcock InformationWeek November 26, 2008

 

The fairly new field of complex event processing sets parameters around a software event and triggers alerts if the rules governing it are violated.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) is staking out a position in complex event processing as applied to business processes; it’s coined the term “business event management” to describe this embryonic field.

Complex event processing is relatively new. It was pioneered over several years by startups such as StreamBase Systems, a company founded by former University of California at Berkeley professor Michael Stonebraker, and both Oracle and IBM now offer it. Complex event processing is an ability to define a discrete software event, then monitor it over time, set parameters around it, and  trigger alerts if the rules governing it are violated.

“What is a complex event? It is an event that could only happen if lots of other events happened,” answered David Luckham, author of the book The Power Of Events and professor emeritus at Stanford University. A mortgage approval is a complex event, and a lot of observers believe that a routine check by a complex event processing system would have tagged many subprime mortgages as candidates for high-risk, if not fraudulent, issuance. News item