1. „Some Remarks for Introducing the BPM/BAM/CEP-Panel“
What BPM/BAM/CEP means and what is special from the perspective of CEP
Rainer von Ammon

2. Now remember the whole picture and what it really means: Monitoring Business Processes and Activities
event cloud with thousands of events per sec…
passwdchange
account login
event patterns and complex event processing…
new auto pay
account login
deposit
withdrawal
new auto pay
transfer
logout
enquiry
deposit
account login
activity history
Sensor 1
account balance
logout
enquiry
passwdchange
account login
new auto pay
enquiry
account login
deposit
withdrawal
new auto pay
transfer
account login
logout
enquiry
deposit
activity history
Sensor 2
logout
At first let me explain a bit, what BPM/BAM/CEP means and what is special from the perspective of CEP:
This slide is from a lecture which I have given the last months.
Shall show the big picture, which I found in the articles of David Luckham in the middle of last year and in his book of 2002:
Above every enterprise an event cloud floats, with thousands or hundred thousands of events per second. David calls this the IT blindness, because although we can monitor the events on a netware level, e.g. by Tivoli, the single, low level events don‘t have any semantics.
What the management resp. the chiefs want to see, is an enterprise cockpit, where they can monitor the business processes of their enterprise and where the Key Performance Indicators are shown in a fancy dashboard, with the posiibility to drill down to the details, e.g. if the speedometer is in the red area.
To this end we have to find and define event patterns from the low level events, we have to aggregate and correlate events to build business level events and so on… a lot of work…
And if necessary, we can change and improve the business process on the fly and redeploy it in the platform, directly on one roundtable between IT people and the people of the operating departments
…e.g. above a bank
The first steps: 1. Redesign your business processes for SOA and BPM 2. Make a SOA, identify services, build WSDL-interfaces… 3. Precise description of patterns of events
4. Detecting patterns in the event cloud
5. Abstraction of complex event pattern instances to higher level events

3. Build businesss level events
The Technology Challenge and the Principle of BPM/BAM/CEP, e.g. for „Next Generation InstantCredit Systems“
Enterprise cockpit
Workflow
Modeler
realize scenario process instances
set parameters
Event
Modeler
Monitor / Analyze / Act
Workflow Engine
based on BPEL
workflows
Model ^=
Scenario
Rules Engine „special“ SQL resp. other languages
AppServer
Event
Store
What is special for the BPM/BAM/CEP perspective?
I guess, we‘ve a threefold challenge: first is the technology challenge, second is the multichanneling challenge and third is the challenge which is caused by SOA.
This slide (I‘m not the greatest desktop publisher!!) shall show the principle how a BPM/BAM/CEP platform could work, e.g. for NextGeneration Instant CreditSystems:
So, we‘ve the grey things, which concern the workflow resp. the BPM stuff,
and we‘ve the blue things, which concern the BAM and the CEP components.
I‘m quite sure that we‘ll have 2 different kinds of people: the workflow modelers or business analysts and the event modelers.
The models of business processes and event scenarios are deployed into a middleware platform, e.g. into an AppServer, which is responsible for high availability, limitless scalability, grid computing, failover, transparency of heterogeneous infrastructures and so on…
The workflow model, eg. for a credit loan process, is executed by a BPEL based workflow engine, as a component deployed to the AppServer.
So, if a credit offer is completed, there will be generated a low level event…
Further, we need special so called adapters for each type of low level events, e.g. an RFID-adapter, an adapter for a Pub/sub-topic, for database commits and so on, e.g. we need special adapters for the completion of a credit offer and for filtering payments events.
Now, we‘ve the Rules Engine and we can define by a special language or tool what shall happen with the low level events, building higher business level events. The rules engine and the code of the rules are also deployed into the AppServer.
At last we can calculate as an ACTION the pott, as the result of the formula offer rates minus bank rates , real time, depending on the paramters which were set in the rules…
And at last we can show all the stuff in an Enterprise cockpit: the pott, offer rates, the current profit, performance of all the instances of the credit process and so on…
analyse history…
Build businesss level events
IF … AND … FOLLOWED BY… WITHIN… ACTION
Adapters e.g. RFID, topics of Pub/Sub, …
calculate pott, offer rates, profit…
e.g. payments
Low Level Event Streams
e.g. credit offers (completed)

4. typical bank-customer process in Retail Banking
The Multichanneling Challenge: same process for each channel and real time processing
Online, Service Terminals
Initiative
Contact Center
After Sales
Branch
Consulting
Sales
This was the challenge from the perspective of technologies.
What is also special for BPM/BAM/CEP, is the challenge which is caused by multichanneling.
This means: we‘ve different channels for the same goal (e.g. selling credits) like internet, online terminals, call centers, branches and so on… and each channel must lead to the same business process and must deliver the same result, in real time!!
This sounds self evidently, but is not true in our reality at present. A bank told me some months ago, that they still have different processes for the channels and the replication or reconciliation of the data and processes would take 13 days.
This means: we cannot „bam“ reasonably and in real time, if we‘ven‘t solved the problem of multichanneling…
typical bank-customer process in Retail Banking

5. The SOA Challenge: Design horizontal and vertical coupling of services Example: Consumer credit process
The third challenge, which could be a bit special for BPM/BAM/CEP, is the challenge of SOA.
This means: we have to model resp. to remodel the process under the perspective of a SOA. Each step of the process can call a service, either anyone inside the enterprise or an external one, provided anywhere in the wolrd.
Or each step can call a whole subprocess, as well inside the enterprise or provided outside.
This could be cascaded arbitrarely deep.
The challenge is
to tailor the services in a right coarse or fine grained way
to master the volatility of this cascaded construction
to guarantee the performance of the process and the needed services
If the SOA building wouldn‘t work well, we couldn‘t „bam“ reasonably, because e.g. the BAM sensors for the KPIs, positioned in the top level process, wouldn‘t deliver reasonable data or values. Whether a service is well tailored resp. well working, is the task of another tool class, the preformance diagnostics tools, for qualitiy assurance of service and their coding…
That‘s it, what I wanted to introduce regarding what is special from the perspective of BPM/BAM/CEP…