Preface
This is a book about modern event processing and its current and future applications in business, government, and the Information Society. Modern event processing at the higher levels of business operations and management is a lot different from the kinds of event processing that are the foundations of computer networks and the Internet. The events are different, their significance and importance to various levels of management are different, and there are far fewer standards and a lot more chaos, confusion, and lack of defined terminology.
Business event processing for the right-now business is a 21st-century development, and it is growing fast. It is a technology aimed at enabling an enterprise to take action right now, the instant information becomes available.
One of my motivations in writing this book was to raise the level of awareness of the basic concepts about events and the different ways event processing can be used in business operations. But the field is expanding and changing as different kinds of commercial applications of event processing keep appearing. So the book is really a work in progress about a field of activity that hasn’t finished evolving.
The book was originally intended for people in business who wanted to know if there is anything of value in “event processing” that might be useful to them in running their businesses. But as it turned out, the book can be read by anyone who has some background in information technology (IT), and uses IT in their work. These days, everyone has a cell phone and is busy multitasking, so in fact all of us are using event processing quite heavily, whether we are conscious of it or not.
This is a much smaller book than the one I wrote in 2002. The field of event processing as we now know it didn’t exist then, so the objective of The Power of Events was to lay out the principles of Complex Event Processing (CEP) that had been researched and developed at Stanford under DARPA contracts over the previous ten years. Its other goal was to encourage commercial development—in fact, I tried that myself, but it’s another story!
Today, many businesses plan strategic initiatives under titles such as “Business Analytics and Optimization.” Although they may not know it, CEP is usually a cornerstone of such initiatives. So another of my goals is to give the reader a good idea of the current marketplace for CEP and the kinds of businesses that are applying event processing and CEP in their operations. I have emphasized examples of event processing in use today in different kinds of businesses, including financial systems and services, transportation, security, fraud detection, health care, energy, and other sectors. And I have tried to make the book as nontechnical as I am able to, in writing about this subject.
CEP is fast becoming an enabling technology, hidden under the hood and forgotten except by the cognoscenti of the IT world. And I believe that is, in fact, the long-term future of CEP—to be forgotten just like the TCP/IP network protocols upon which our IT-driven lives depend.
The Power of Events contains a lot of event-processing techniques that have not yet seen commercial application. But I still think, as I did then, that these techniques will become part of commercial applications of event processing in the future. So I have included examples here of the use in business operations of such concepts as causal and timing relations between events and the organization of events into hierarchies.
The final chapter is a personal vision of some of the different roles that event processing technology will play in our information society in the future. This is my pet topic, and the chapter could have been a lot longer. Readers will no doubt think of other applications that are not included here, and indeed I hope they do! In this way, the book may contribute to the further development of event processing.
There are nine chapters. Here’s what’s in them:
Chapter 1: What event processing is and why might it be important to a business
Chapter 2: Four different event processing technologies that have developed over the past sixty years
Chapter 3: Basic concepts of event processing and CEP
Chapter 4: Stages in the development of modern event processing in business and government
Chapter 5: The marketplace for CEP, who’s using event processing, and the kinds of business problems to which it is being applied
Chapter 6: More event processing concepts, such as patterns of multiple events, timing of events, and causality between events (understanding these concepts is important if you’re interested in investing in event processing technology for your business, as they enable you to judge what you’re being sold!)
Chapter 7: Strategies for applying CEP in a business
Chapter 8: Organizing events for different role players in the enterprise
Chapter 9: How the future of event processing and CEP may turn out
There is also an Appendix containing a glossary of event processing terminology.
David Luckham
Palo Alto, California
November 2011