Event Processing: The Real-Time Insights Enabler

In today’s fast-paced environment, business managers often must use event processing to make quick operational decisions to be successful and gain competitive advantage. Here, RT Insights contributor Lisa Matkowsky explains how event processing is the IT technology that is the enabler of real-time business insights.

In order to make the best possible decisions, managers need visibility into streams of business events as they happen. The managers who can respond the most quickly by using analysis of real-time event streams can significantly improve their organizations’ results in sales, customer service, manufacturing, finance and operations.

This “real-time business insight” has at its core an IT technology called event processing (EP), a method of tracking and analyzing (processing) streams of information (data) about things that happen (events), and deriving a conclusion from them. “EP is a key ingredient in what are called ‘smart’ systems,” said Roy Schulte, VP and Business Intelligence (BI) analyst at Gartner. “Managers who understand the discipline of EP have the key to working smarter, not harder.”

According to Schulte, it’s a familiar story. “The pace of business has increased, the world is changing faster and competition is getting tougher,” he said. “These business pressures have inspired the development of numerous modern management strategies, with the net result that the world is awash with advice on why your company needs to be more responsive and adaptable. It’s now time to move on to the more important discussion of how to actually do it. Smart devices, sense-and-respond systems and situation awareness depend on getting the maximum value from business event data.”

In recent years, many applications are using events and streaming data in various forms to automate and improve a myriad of computing processes and applications, from fraud detection to heart monitors. With the recent explosion of Big Data, predictive analytics, intelligent devices (aka, the Internet of Things) and intelligent integration, EP has now taken center stage as a linchpin and enabler of these technological advancements.

The figure below illustrates some of the principle ways that event processing can be used. We aim to cover all of these EP categories, providing in-depth insight into the trends, business benefits and technical issues of EP technology.