Emerging Trends in Software Infrastructure

Action Recommendations for 2004

Security considerations must be addressed by taking advantage of technologies such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Kerberos, because Web services may expose up to 70 percent of organizational firewalls to malicious-code attacks before WS- Security specifications reach deployment status beginning in 2005. End users should transform select applications to first- generation SOBA-based formats through integration with emerging Web services specifications, such as SOAP and Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and begin investigating more-advanced Web services standards, such as BPEL and Web Services Composite Application Framework (WS-CAF), for future composite formation. Push key application software providers -- especially those that provide niche or industry- specific applications -- to state if they plan to offer SOBAs and what migration path they propose. Providers that can't or won't give this information by the end of 2004 should be downgraded on your list of preferred vendors.

Prediction -- Event management technology will reshape the way businesses run by making applications expose the business events that they touch.

Enterprises will achieve new levels of flexibility and a deeper understanding of their business processes by applying the techniques of complex-event processing (CEP) to their daily work. Application systems and office productivity tools will emit a steady stream of event messages that report on hundreds of activities of business significance. CEP agents will analyze, correlate and summarize these low-level events into higher-level events suitable for notifying people in human terms or for triggering automated processes. Businesses will operate more efficiently, with early warning of potential opportunities and problems, and with better understanding of the root causes that change conditions.

We consider message-oriented middleware (MOM) to be an enabler of the simplest of four levels of event management. Simple events are widely used (although still underutilized). MOM has only the most basic "rules" -- it will do publish and subscribe (pub-sub) on message headers, but that's all. The turning point is not simple events, however. The next big wave of event exploitation will be CEP. CEP is rare in business applications today, but it won't be in five years. The computer science for CEP is not entirely new -- some aspects have been used in IT operations management software for a decade, and most operating systems are bastions of CEP. Although some CEP technology is still in the research labs, little CEP has been embedded in tools that are aimed at business applications. That's the big paradigm shift -- applying CEP to a domain where it was hardly ever used before, which requires new development and middleware tools. For most people, "events" still mean IT operations management software and application management issues. The lack of standards is a serious limitation. The Web services movement has started to work on this, starting with guaranteed delivery and soon to address pub-sub. Official standards for CEP, however, will take several more years. However, CEP is emerging, with or without standards.

Strategic Planning Assumptions: More than two-thirds of new applications will emit business events by 2008 (0.6 probability). More than 40 percent of all knowledge worker jobs in Western economies will be assisted by business activity monitoring (BAM) based on CEP by 2008 (0.6 probability).