What is Complex Event Processing?

Complex event processing (CEP) is the analysis of event data in real-time to generate immediate insight and enable instant response to changing conditions. What do we mean by event data? Let's start with events: an event is something that happens. Events are happening all around us all the time. A price change in the securities market is an event. A transaction is an event. An airplane taking off is an event. There are also non-events to consider. If an event is something that happens, a non-event is something that does not happen, but was supposed to. A non-event could be a car part that misses a step in the assembly line production or an inventory item that does not make it from the delivery truck to the warehouse. For the sake of simplicity though, we will just refer to all of these as events.

In today's wired world, all of these events create data in IT systems. Thus our IT networks are flowing with event data—some would say flooding with data. While we have built systems that process those individual events to automate processes, most firms have not even begun to harness the value in the information contained within that event data. The problem is one of being able to see the forest for the trees: distilling high level insight from lots of low level discrete events can be challenging.

What's so Complex about Complex Event Processing?

Complex Event Processing is a specialization within the broader field of Event Processing (EP). Simple event processing is the processing of a single event in isolation. Sure Aleri can do that, but to be honest that's not very interesting. Traditional technologies—transaction processing, messaging middleware, etc.—have been available for years to process individual events has they occur. Instead, Complex event processing looks at events in the context of other events rather than in isolation. Complex event processing generates new events that are high level events—you could think of them as compound events—that contain information rather than raw data (single events being the raw data).

Complex Event Processing is:

• Spotting patterns or trends that represent opportunities or threats, as they happen, so that you can respond immediately
• Combining data from multiple sources and continuously computing aggregate values so that you know your position (or exposure) at all times
• Constantly monitoring the interaction of data so that you can adjust to changing conditions

Real-Time Response with Complex Event Processing

Complex Event Processing allows for real-time response: not reacting to what happened yesterday or even 5 minutes ago but what is happening right now. Latency is delay, and for some companies could mean millions of dollars in lost revenue. Whether you measure latency in micro-seconds, milliseconds, or seconds, Aleri Complex Event Processing enables immediate insight and response.

Aleri Complex Event Processing is "Right Now"

Over the past few years, powerful data analysis tools have become available to extract insight from large sets of event data captured in historical databases. They help firms learn from the past—but they don't help firms react to the present. If you want to spot an opportunity right now, see how current conditions have made you vulnerable right now, or adjust to what's going on in the market right now, historical data analysis tools can't help. But Aleri Complex Event Processing can.