The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) has become the de facto integration fabric for modern service-oriented architectures (SOAs). By connecting and mediating services, ESBs help create streams of events that have significant business value. To take full advantage of these new streams of data, a new class of software called event stream processing, or ESP, provides the ability to monitor and analyze events as they flow through an ESB, identify patterns among them, and invoke appropriate actions instantly – at the instant threat or opportunity is detected. ESP enables an event-driven SOA to decipher event patterns (if A is followed by B and then by C), with temporal (within 4 seconds) or spatial (within 10 feet) constraints among events as they flow through the ESB. And more importantly, with ESP you can react to these patterns instantly. Some think of ESP as an “enterprise monitor” that allows a business to continuously analyze business conditions in real-time, identify threat and opportunity, and act in real-time.
ESP makes ESB services more intelligent, and is the next step in the evolution of the ESB revolution.
