As the overall pace of business increases, the need to detect and react quickly to events increases as well. The way events are processed today must keep pace with the volume of data and the complex requirements demanded by modern business efficiency. As a developer, you need to make the connection between the technologies you can provide and the business needs, and we're here to tell you how.

Event processing in today's real-time converged IP telephony environment requires technology that provides real-time data analysis to detect critical business events, allowing your organization to respond immediately. Event processing should collect, organize and filter high-volume data to detect key events that require action to sustain your company's business flow. Your application's event processing should respond in real-time to drive communications-enabled business processes.

Today, event processors are being applied across multiple industries. Applications utilizing event processors include business process management (BPM), network security and outages, utility/operational data detection systems, financial services and customer relationship management (CRM). For example, in network security, event processing within your application needs to be able to analyze recent events from within the firewall, intrusion detection systems and other devices. Further, event processing should be combined with transaction history, as well as correlate information from multiple systems in a process to track and manage exceptions.

Next, from a utility perspective, your event processing application should analyze sensor and other operational data to detect or predict network problems. In the financial services arena, your application should correlate information from multiple exchanges to find arbitrage opportunity. Finally, from a CRM perspective, event processing software within your application should correlate information from multiple systems to detect sales leads.

To be on the cutting edge of event processing, these are optimal goals to which you should aspire as a developer. Here's how you get there.

Event Processing at Avaya

Figure 1. Avaya's Event Processing Software Solution

Figure 1 defines Avaya's event processing software solution, which allows Avaya communications applications to be integrated into your company's business processes through customizable Web Services. The Event Processor is able to receive data from multiple streams and correlate them using the queries you have written using Avaya's query language. It is also able to pull in data from databases to enhance the dynamic data from the streams. When significant events are detected, it fires off sophisticated scripts in the Communications Process Manager, which in turn orchestrates your company's business processes and other communications resources like the Communications Manager and Voice Portal. The result is rapid event detection and response.

Event processing, as you may know, is defined as a set of tools, platforms and techniques that enable the rapid development and deployment of solutions that can process and analyze changes in data, and enable enterprises to quickly react to changes in the business environment. You should have the ability to process high-volume streaming data, transactional data, as well as unstructured data. Data should be easily transformed and enriched, as well as be organized into time and event streams for continuous and asynchronous analysis.

Event processing capabilities within your application should provide the ability to correlate data changes in multiple streams over time windows, detect events and have predictive capabilities. Finally, your app should be able to send actionable events immediately for communications-enabled workflow.

Event processing in the Avaya solution focuses application development on event definition, detection and action, complex joining, matching and moving time windows. The ability to express these complex conditions using a simple Event Processing Language allows for more expedient application development.