Finding the Most Effective Tools for CEP
Within information technology, an event is basically anything that happens within a system that causes a change of state. Events occur at specific times and can be recorded. For businesses, there are generally three main kinds of events.
- Business Transactions: These are things like customer orders, invoices, and deposits.
- Information Reports: This can include any kind of relevant information; from business intelligence to social media and news reports.
- IoT Data: This is data obtained via the internet of things. This may include real-time data analysis, GPS-driven location information, and any other information picked up by sensors installed in IoT devices.
The internet has generally operated with a request/response architecture in which one computer on a network sends a request for information to another computer, and then the second computer responds. This still serves well enough in some areas, but for enterprise businesses that have so many events going on simultaneously, a better system is required.
What is event processing?
Modern event processing architecture allows streams of events to be processed simultaneously rather than having to wait on a request-response for every individual event. This naturally improves efficiency a great deal by eliminating decision latency, and it helps ensure an organization’s data is always as accurate and current as possible. Data is at its most valuable the moment it’s recorded, and event processing helps this crucial asset maintain its value.
Complex event processing (CEP) takes things a step further by establishing correlations between events, and comparing them to historical data. CEP systems assume that all events can hold significance and records them asynchronously in order to identify additional opportunities for your organization, or to discover potential threats. In a world where the market can change in nearly an instant, or a cyberattack can bring down an entire enterprise, CEP is crucial for protection and data management. Here are some of the most effective types of CEP tools and how you can use them in your organization.

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Market Data Tools
Complex event processing can be used to detect significant market events, such as the rise and fall of stock and commodity prices. CEP is critical for business intelligence since informed business decisions can’t be made to respond to events without the best data. You might even use CEP tools to keep track of changes with your main competitors, so you can be sure your competitive analysis for each one is always up to date.
Business Process Management
It’s hard to find a more natural fit for CEP than with your BPM solutions. Business process management helps to define processes in new ways and automate them when possible, and the data collected with CEP can help optimize these systems even further. When business leaders understand the benefits that CEP can bring, and integrate the technology with other tools; it creates a form of operational transparency that enables immediate reactions to operational data as it emerges.
IoT Deployments
The internet of things has allowed all manner of devices to communicate with each other via the internet using sensors and network connections, and large-scale businesses in all industries have started using IoT devices like GPS trackers for fleet management, smart wearables to measure vital signs, cloud-enabled security camera systems, and much more. With so much information constantly coming in from so many different sources, it’s not hard to see how CEP is becoming the standard way to oversee IoT devices and applications.
Complex event processing is the fastest way to let your organization gather data, analyze it, and respond to events as they occur. With creative implementations, you can improve business processes, enhance customer service, use resources more efficiently, and much more.