'Business event processing' now in the spotlight

Last week, in one of its classic 300-product mega-announcements, IBM unveiled what it calls its business event processing line, "representing a unification of several IBM global initiatives, including Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Information on Demand, virtualization and Web 2.0."

Is 'business event processing' too much to swallow?

Business event processing is one of those terms that really sounds cool and a must-have. But what is BEP? Is BEP a good bet?

My esteemed colleague Tony Baer, who has been following this space for some time, congratulated IBM for having the common sense to recognize what it already had, and to start positioning products under the BEP umbrella.

However, he also cautioned that "event processing is not something you buy with a single shrink-wrapped application." (Hmm... sounds like SOA...)

Tony explains that event-processing "technologies are diverse, and so are the use cases. For starters, lets ask, just what is event processing? Some call it event processing to refer to something generic; there is also complex event processing where you parse intricate sequences of events or occurrences that could only be detectable by machine; and then there is business event processing, which is the idea that we’re not just talking about events in the abstract."

Tony says BEP takes in a huge range of disciplines, including  high performance, low latency, high throughout, structured and/or unstructured text or rich media data, and detection of highly complex event patterns requiring complex rules processing, among other things. In other words, a lot of solutions from a lot of different areas of IT, and some of them non-trivial implementations:

"We wonder whether there is such a thing an event, business event, or complex event processing market per se. We have our doubts, not because the category is so difficult to bound, but because event processing is not an end in itself or discrete market. Instead, event processing is part of business solutions ranging from telco provisioning to capital markets trading, check or credit clearing, supply chain optimization, law enforcement and homeland security, and so on."

IBM seems intent on offering some sort of point solutions that would at least get some companies started on the road to BEP. Big Blue says the purpose of BEP technology is to "automatically track, analyze and respond to changing business conditions -- whether the events that trigger them are planned or unplanned."

Why is this important? IBM cites the explosion of business information from email, voicemail and new sources such as RFID, and estimates that there are now up to 72 quadrillion unique business events generated worldwide each day. "The ability to process these information streams quickly and accurately is one of the most complex tasks facing businesses today, requiring massive computing power and the most advanced software and hardware available."

Gartner VP Roy Schulte recently estimated that a typical large company may have up to a trillion events per day somewhere within its networks."

The question is, of course, which of these billions and trillions of events need to be captured and automated. That's going to take a while to sort out.