The recent years have elevated the important evolution of event processing that originated decades ago as a method to communicate between computers and systems. More recently the information architectural approach of complex event processing (CEP) has become part of many applications and systems while also fueling an industry debate about the technology itself. As technology infrastructure CEP provides a critical role in the real time listening and processing events by applying filters to determine what events need to be specially processed through a collection of rules and policies and correlation to other events and data.
As part of this event processing additional monitoring can be applied to determine if events should be regards as relevant and sent to someone for notification or further processed into complimentary technologies. This is also where technology like Business Activity Monitoring has placed the simple elements of presenting the events into a dashboard for better visibility but fall short as I have previously written about as the Dead End for BAM. This portion of CEP is quite clear and the level of events from the network level to the application or business level can be processed to support a range of requirements for the relevant event. There are a large number of events sources, in face our research on Operational Intelligence and CEP found that 50% of organizations have more than 11 sources to process.

Unfortunately many in the industry have confused the discussion where they believe CEP is the technology market for a new generation of capabilities which actually already occurred decades ago. The new advancements is actually in the tools that can be used or applications that are assembled to help business or consumers understand the relevant importance of specific events and only provide the information when it is needed. This is the essential divide between monitoring and intelligence where monitoring is based on thresholds and does not provide the context and relevance of the actually impact of events occurrence to something that matters to an individual, business activity or process.

This is where Operational Intelligence comes to bear as the advance of specific business technology that can help organizations with a wide range of needs that depend on intelligence being applied to the actually interactions inside organizations from the application to the network level. As I have pointed out it is a new generation of information and insight that helps organizations be more responsive and optimize business process as found in our benchmark research on Operational Intelligence and CEP. But CEP is not used to a business or IT advantage without using Operational Intelligence that can do something useful with the events that is more than just notification or presenting them in a dashboard.

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Regards,

Mark Smith - CEO & EVP Research