Oracle Debuts EDA

Oracle has announced the general availability of its EDA (Event-Driven Architecture) suite, which consists of business activity monitoring (BAM), an enterprise service bus (BUS), an event management server, Oracle Business Rules, and Oracle Enterprise Messaging.

Most of the components are native Oracle technology but Ashish Mohindroo, Senior Product Director of Oracle Fusion Middleware, notes that the BAM product was originally PeopleSoft code. Click here to find out more!

Mohindroo offered Line56 plenty of examples of EDA in action from a business perspective. "If there's a stock transaction delay, instead of waiting for an hourly batch report, the event capture system tells you instantaneously that the system is down, or that the credit report didn't meet the requirements."

EDA thus senses and diagnoses a business event (typically an operational exception like a transaction failure or a failed shipment), but that's only half the story. EDA can only automatically initiate a business process keyed to the event. If a shipment fails, for example, EDA can send instant alerts to all process owners.

EDA's relevance to your business is in direct proportion to the volume of events with which you're faced, and how important it is for you to automate responses to particular events (like exceptions). Mohindroo singles out financial services, telecommunications, retail (think of the vast volume of data created by radio frequency identification), consumer packaged goods, and the public sector as high event-volume environments.

Analyst Ian Charlesworth of Ovum identifies what he considers Oracle EDA's chief strength: "The EDA Suite, like the larger SOA [service-oriented architecture] Suite of which it is part, enjoys extremely good levels of technical integration. It gives organizations the key building blocks they need to 'event-enable' their infrastructure as part of a move towards SOA."

Mohindroo concludes by situating the value of SOA and EDA alike at the heart of business efficiency. "Business is moving towards who can define new business models faster, who can respond faster. EDA allows you to respond faster."

http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7715