Event-driven SOA

Concept

The typical SOA platform orchestrates services centrally, through pre-defined business processes, assuming that what should have already been triggered is defined in a business process. This approach doesn't account for events that occur across or outside of specific business processes. Thus complex events, in which a pattern of activities—both random and scheduled—should trigger a set of services is not accounted for in traditional SOA 1.0 architecture.

SOA 2.0

SOA 2.0 architecture, ("event-driven SOA"), lets business users monitor, analyze, and enrich events to make the connections among disparate events that do not at first appear to be intuitively obvious to become visible to others, and possible automate actions to take to address some unique pattern.

SOA 2.0 is the ability to create high-level business events from numerous low-level system events. Events are created by filtering real-time data (from middleware, applications, databases, and Web services, for example) and infusing it with defining detail such as dependencies or causal relationships discovered by correlating other events.

SOA 2.0 Examples

Abandoned Shopping Cart

For example, you could construct a CRM event from an "abandoned shopping cart" message (parsing out the transaction, customer ID, and time), using other filters to extract the value of goods in the cart and tapping the correlation capabilities of the system to add causal indicators such as whether the commerce site was suffering performance problems. Your CRM event might also include customer value or rank from the customer database.

Engineering Defect

For another example, based on the types of independent service calls received, the SOA 2.0 platform could identify a product defect by detecting the underlying pattern of the separate complaints, then triggering an alert to engineering or production of the possible defect.

Real-time Electricity Market

Example 3: A potential use of event-driven SOA could be a virtual market where home clothes dryers can bid on the price of the electricity they use in a real-time market pricing system. The real-time market price and control system cuold turn home electricity customers into active participants in managing the power grid and their monthly utility bills. Customers can set limits on how much they would pay for electricity to run a clothes dryer, for example, and electricity providers willing to transmit power at that price would be alerted over the grid and could sell the electricity to the dryer.

On one side, consumer devices can bid for power based on how much the owner of the device were willing to pay set ahead of time. On the other side, suppliers entered bids automatically from their electricity generators, for example, based on how much it would cost to start up and run them.