webMethods Business Events

FAQs

1. What is Complex Event Processing (CEP)?

CEP is a new class of data management apps designed to continuously analyze event streams and trigger appropriate actions immediately. Event streams are filtered, correlated, aggregated and enriched with information—for example, using persistent data from databases.

You can easily detect patterns or event sequences (“Event A followed by Event B, then Event C or D”) in real-time. CEP also considers temporal (“within the last two minutes”) or spatial (“within a radius of two kilometers”) constraints.

By incorporating CEP in your apps, you can gain live insights and know when to initiate appropriate actions.

2. What are examples of apps using CEP?

In financial markets, you might use CEP like this: If the average ratio of the prices of Stock A and B in the last 10 minutes deviates from the common ratio of five to three by more than 10 percent, notify the trader (pair trading).

For fraud detection, CEP can help in this way: If more than 10 transactions for the same credit card have been issued within the last five minutes at different locations around the world, block the card and call the owner.

And in logistics: When a truck arrives at a hub and all shipped pallets are not scanned within 60 minutes, send an SMS to the operations manager. Or when a truck leaves the expected route by more than five miles, or enters a pre-defined danger zone, alert the operations manager. 

3. Why webMethods Business Events?

Most businesses rely on a complex and dynamic interplay of millions of events that happen daily. For example, orders are cancelled, packages get lost and customers do things that are unusual.

To stay competitive, you must recognize and react to important events like these faster than ever. Until now, that’s been difficult because there’s so much event data and it comes from all kinds of systems. It’s been tough to extract the right relevant knowledge to take the right action at the right time.

webMethods Business Events resolves that by leveraging CEP in combination with the powerful real-time dashboards. And, thanks to the event-driven webMethods architecture, you can quickly adapt processes to changing conditions, exceptions or arising opportunities. This level of integration helps you improve business performance and also deliver solutions—faster.

4. What makes webMethods Business Events a complete CEP infrastructure?

webMethods Business Events consists of a full set of integrated components:

• A sophisticated CEP engine, which correlates and analyzes high-volume event streams, extracting meaningful events and detecting patterns on-the-fly
• ARIS MashZone Event Edition for interactive, analytical dashboarding for static and live data feeds
• An Eclipse plug-in for SQL-based development of business logic
• webMethods Integration Server and webMethods Broker for capturing and publishing events

You can extend webMethods Business Events by adding:

• Event Type Governance: Archive, categorize and govern event definitions in CentraSite.
• Event Store: Use OLAP-style analytics to combine historical event data with live insights.
• webMethods BPMS: Adapt or initiate processes automatically to react to important outbound events using webMethods Business Process Management Suite (BPMS).

5. Why is webMethods Business Events better than other options for CEP?

Software AG brings you an integrated environment, rather than disparate components. What’s more, we offer not just an event engine but a complete infrastructure.

You can achieve instantly responsive BPM because other webMethods products can send events to the webMethods Business Events event engine to trigger actions through outbound events.

Additionally, unlike custom coding or proprietary languages, webMethods Business Events leverages SQL to express business logic. Lots of developers are familiar with SQL so you can use existing skill sets to get event-driven—faster.

You also can count on high visibility, thanks to flexible mashups that fuse real-time dashboards with static content. Live and historical analytics, incorporating insights from event history into current analysis, paves the way towards predictive business.