Cynthia R. Field said
Although intended for the IT community, the authors conclusions are readily understood and are applicable to most anyone who needs to make sense of the vast amount of rapidly changing information needed to make sound business decisions.
Clearly written, with real-world examples to illustrate salient points, this is a must-read.
P. Sullivan said
Much of my work involves integration of mainframe and web applications, and I originally chose this book to get an overview of the advantages that Event Processing might provide for sharing information across diverse platforms. While it has proven to be a comprehensive guide to Event Processing, the primary benefit I've gained from it so far was completely unexpected. The bulk of the processing done at our company is accomplished in a nightly batch run consisting of hundreds of legacy COBOL applications. As the maintenance cost required for making changes to this system is quite high, there have been a number of past initiatives to replace it. The sheer size of the system, and the large number of business processes it impacts, make a complete "all-at-once" replacement impractical. Even modularized SOA approaches to the redesign have been hard to justify in terms of future benefits other than reduced maintenance time. This book pointed me to the missing requirement with the statement that "EDA systems are more agile ... because they are minimally coupled." Our previous attempts to modernize this system focused on breaking the functions into separate modules but left the data flow basically unchanged, which forced the new modules to be tightly coupled and highly interdependent. By employing the Event Processing Network concept we redefined the pieces of our cycle as complex events, with both synchronous and asynchronous aspects to the processing. The resulting design promises benefits in both maintenance and daily operation. The book also aided in getting approval for the system renovation, by helping some of the non-IT managers to better understand the business advantages inherent in the new design. Most of this material is common sense after you've read it, but it helps to see it laid out clearly and explained in a way that everyone can understand.
iit grad said
Authors make a compelling business case for adopting event-driven architecture (EDA). They show many use-cases and provide good set of questions to ask and a business case model to decide whether EDA is appropriate or not. Definitely written for business managers who like to drive the technology agenda for competitive advantage.
At first I felt the book was light on how to go about implementation. After reading several sections more than once did I realize that they have packed lot of information in seemingly simple language. They provide lot of systems level details in a common denominator language.
What I didn't like was their top-down classification and tendency to define buckets (quadrants). I would have liked to see a bottom-up approach showing what problem is being solved, how EDA can solve it and then classify.
K. Krishnan said
For the longest time, Prof. Luckham's "Power of Events" was the only book available written by a well known professor in the field. Much has happened since 2002 in this field, and now Prof. Chandy has released this much updated volume with the help of Mr. Schulte from the Gartner Group. This collaboration, which blends the academic view with that of an analyst gives this book a very down to earth flavor - practical applications temper theoretical considerations. This is NOT a nuts-and-bolts book on how to program for Event Processing; however, this book admirably achieves its goal of educating any level of IT professional or manager about Events, Event Streams, Complex Event Processing and Event Driven Architectures (all buzz words that get thrown around in this industry). You will come away with a solid understanding of what these terms mean, and why they are important to you. Practical applications range from simple RFID based location, to Fraud Detection to solving world-wide shortages, as this book shows. It's a fairly quick read for the busy IT manager, and well worth the while.
Jeff said
This book is an excellent introduction to those that are new to the concept of Event Processing and even those that are well versed in this field will find it useful in helping to think about how EP fits in the broader IT context. Complex Event Processing can help firms improve situational awareness - knowing what is going on right now, to respond quickly to emerging opportunities and threats and to make better decisions based on more complete and timely information. This timely information - or continuous intelligence - is a huge lead over the traditional batch-oriented "business intelligence" tools that are great at telling you what happened last week or last month, but not able to tell you what's going on right now. This book is an easy read - you don't have to be a technologist - as it explains to business people how they can benefit from systems that extract insight from the flood of event information that is already available to them.
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