What Are Events, And Why Do They Matter To Application Development Professionals?

Events are showing up in more places that matter to application developers. They occur in many important new usage scenarios such as program-based trading and are relevant to many IT roles, including enterprise architects and business analysts. The increasingly real-time nature of business drives requirements for more real-time event processing, especially in financial services, order processing, customer service, and Web-based business. The increasing amount of business-relevant information available from real-time event streams presents new opportunities to serve business with rapid responses to changing conditions. Plus, there are an increasing number of technical options for exploiting events to drive business behavior, from business activity monitoring (BAM) to business process management (BPM) to operations and systems management (OSM). Application developers need to understand events in order to know how to exploit new opportunities and also to avoid potential confusion when discussing events with business users.