BPM-EAI

We have seen that over the period of time organizations have invested heavily into SOA and BPM primarily to bring business agility in responding to change in their business scenario. In my opinion SOA has definitely brought about a transformational change. We could leverage existing investment organizations have made in the legacy applications and ERP systems and could expose their functionality as reusable services using SOA as architecture model. SOA has also provided sophisticated integration technologies like ESB (Enterprise Service bus) to build complex business processes around these services. We have been using BPM technologies to bring in agility in modeling and implementing new business processes on the fly and utilized SOA infrastructure and services to automate large parts of these business processes.

Even though BPM & SOA has brought considerable improvement I see these mostly reactive in nature. SOA functions and BPM provide business processes which mostly react to the user requests. It's not a mandate of SOA to identify trends and patterns across these requests and then proactively take action to benefit from these trends or avoid any unusual happenings. SOA & BPM does not proactively identify suspicious happenings across tens of thousands of these invocations. This is precisely where Compex Event Processing (CEP) comes into picture and brings the benefits of being a watchdog which can sense new situations and abnormalities and respond to these. CEP gathers hundreds and thousands of events originating from SOA and BPM and uses the rules to identify patterns which suggest anomalies, threats or opportunities. It then alerts manual or automated processes to take corrective action. Typical application of the CEP technologies can be identified which requires some form of "situation awareness" or "sense and response" and "tracking and tracing" aspects which are predominant in business situations.