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research staff member

In the fiercely competitive financial services field, using advanced technology to stay in touch with customers and provide better service can serve as a strong differentiator that reinforces customer loyalty and attracts new business. Researchers at IBM's Haifa Research Lab (HRL), working in tandem with IBM Global Business Services (GBS), are assisting companies in using an automated process to alert customers to specific trigger events, such as account transfers or credit limit violations. IBM WebSphere Message Broker's complex event processing (CEP) nodes allow users to define business rules that determine the manner in which the various systems will respond to changing conditions.

Since 2000, HRL staff member Guy Sharon has applied his expertise in the field of active and event-driven technologies, spearheading the development of the CEP Detector Nodes SupportPac in WebSphere Message Broker, as well as providing support for GBS engagements.

"Event-driven technologies are becoming more popular as businesses become increasingly automated and dynamic," says Guy. "For the past eight years, the CEP team in the Haifa Research Lab has been working on complex event processing technology and event-driven solutions, building business-level CEP tools and integrating them into IBM products, solutions and customer projects. In today's on-demand environment, CEP is capable of detecting complex situations (a context-sensitive composition of messages and events), rather than single events. It allows the user to configure the middleware in terms of business needs, monitoring situations related to user-defined rules and events. For example, you can pre-set and automatically correct parameters for breaches of Service Level Agreements."

In a recent GBS engagement with a large, international banking institution, the HRL CEP team worked with IBM GBS consultants to devise an end-to-end solution for the client, using IBM WebSphere Message Broker's CEP Nodes to analyze and filter information on customers' account transactions and generate alerts sent to the end user via email and SMS. The result was a more closely connected banking clientele and a significant reduction in time allocated to answering account inquiries.

"The added capacities of CEP enhance the ability to develop advanced solutions in any industry and sector," says Guy. "Our focus is mainly in the banking and insurance sectors, but the CEP application has also been used in the defense, manufacturing and healthcare industries."

Guy notes that future possibilities for CEP technology could include event-driven applications (EDA) such as real-time risk and compliance, business activity monitoring, sensors and actuators, and helping clients create more agile processes for a variety of business applications. "We believe EDA could be an important part of IBM's service oriented architecture strategy."