Advancing SOA with an Event-Driven Architecture

Executive Overview

In most organizations, events drive action. In financial services, for example, a stock dipping below a threshold price may trigger a sell order. In manufacturing, production may start when an order is received. In healthcare, an unusual increase in the number of patients registering in an emergency room could signal the start of a disease outbreak, calling for action on the part of medical staff and public health officials.

In all of these cases, a business process is started, stopped, or modified based on an event or series of events. The ability to realistically model event processing in software is a crucial capability for organizations that want to become more responsive to their customers and partners, and for achieving greater operational efficiency.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a start in this direction. SOA delivers greater speed and flexibility for IT organizations that need to respond to changing business requirements. It also enables easier reuse of applications and data in multiple business processes, and greater accessibility to this information for users. And through reuse SOA helps free developers to complete more projects, reduce IT backlogs, and deliver additional value to the business. But without event-processing capabilities, an organization with service-oriented systems remains bound by the same limits as before - it can respond to a business event only as fast as its employees can discover the event, determine a course of action, and allocate resources to respond.

Adding event processing to an SOA, through an event-driven architecture (EDA), can take your organization beyond these limits. It will give your information systems the ability to sense and respond to events rapidly, either through an automated process or human interaction.

This white paper explains how InterSystems Ensemble enables you to create advanced SOA systems that include EDA, making it easier to respond quickly to significant business events, and giving you a competitive advantage.