Progress ESB link to event-stream processing

24.08.2005
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Paul Krill ist Redakteur unserer US-Schwesterpublikation InfoWorld.

Progress Software executives anticipate an eventual link between ESB (enterprise service bus) technology and ESP (event-stream processing) to provide business activity monitoring (BAM) in service-oriented networks.

ESBs offer service integration in these networks while ESP technology serves to monitor events.

"Adding ESP into a BAM or basing a BAM environment on ESP is interesting," Progress CTO Gordon Van Huizen said, because all kinds of valuable business information could result from correlating streams of events. Real-time sequencing of events is provided.

Progress describes ESP as a computing paradigm to process streams of event data with the intent of identifying meaningful events within those streams. Tens of thousands of events per second can be monitored.

The company offers real-time event processing in its Progress ESP Platform, while sister company Sonic Software sells the Sonic ESB product. The ESP Platform is being formally unveiled on Sept. 6 and features technology gained when Progress acquired Apama in April.

A link between Progress"s ESP software and an ESB makes sense, said Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis.

"You could definitely link complex event processing into a service-oriented network," Willett said.

Complex event processing, which is how Current Analysis labels software packages such as ESP, represents a new market, he added. But Progress has an advantage in that it has a shipping product and customers.

"Right now, it"s a very emerging market [with a] very limited number of use cases, but I think that will grow over time," Willett said.

Progress is expanding ESP beyond its initial reach into financial-services trading applications via SmartBlocks technology, which provides a framework for building reusable event processing stream modules. The expansion is focused on applications in monitoring and surveillance, in which assets are tracked; RFID; manufacturing command and control; and oil and gas exploration.

The company at the end of the year plans to release Version 3.0 of the Progress ESP Platform, which will include improvements in scalability and fault tolerance and custom dashboard generation.

"A trader could generate their own dashboard," said John Trigg, principal product manager in the Progress Real Time Division.

Progress ESP competes with the StreamBase Systems" StreamBase platform. But Progress officials say they have a two-year jump on StreamBase because of factors such as deployment levels and developer participation.

Among the components in the ESP platform is Event Modeler, which features a graphical environment for deploying real-time event processing scenarios without low-level coding. Another component, Event Manager, furnishes management capabilities.

SmartBlocks are part of Event Modeler. The Dashboards feature of ESP, meanwhile, offers a Web-based user interface to monitor scenarios and receive alerts.

(InfoWorld Test Center Executive Editor Doug Dineley contributed to this article.)