Effective data processing to help firms improve operations

At a time when most enterprises around the globe are seeing an explosion in the volumes of their digital events, the management of the data with effective event processing mechanism is the need of the hour, says research firm Gartner.

Event processing aims to identify meaningful events within volumes of digital events and then analyse its impact from the macro level.

This helps companies achieve situational awareness to be able to make better and faster decisions.

The data splurge in modern day enterprises is something which manual intervention will hardly be able to manage. The aspirations of the businesses now-a-days cannot be achieved by simply speeding up traditional business process of exhorting people to work harder and smarter with conventional applications.

Gartner recently released a book 'Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies' which has discussed how to handle such problems at the appropriate time and level.

The book has been co-authored by Roy Schulte, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, and K Mani Chandy, Simon Ramo Professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The book says the main reason for the recent upsurge of interest in event processing is that a continuous intelligence has become practical for use in a wider variety of business situations.

"While a typical business process has time-driven, request-driven and event-driven aspects, event-driven architecture (EDA) is underutilised in system design resulting in slow and inflexible systems. Event-driven systems are intrinsically smart because they are context-aware and run when they detect changes in the business world," said Chandy.

According to Gartner, while event processing is based on EDA, complex-event processing (CEP) is the second major thing. Event-driven CEP is a way of distilling the information value from many incoming, simpler 'base' business events into a few more useful, summary-level 'complex' events.

CEP is used in a number of ways including supplying information to business dashboards, sending alerts to people through e-mail, SMS or other channels, triggering business processes, application systems or services.