Merely processing this information is insufficient. CIOs must strive to create an instantly responsive enterprise—one that addresses these huge volumes of information in real time, creating immediate and valuable insights that can be acted on at a moment's notice. In today's competitive environment, IT must rapidly recognize trends and patterns and proactively use the information to deliver strategic business knowledge and enable real-time decision making.

Making this transition requires a new approach. CIOs need event-driven computing capabilities that instantaneously filter, aggregate and correlate events. Although event-driven computing does exist in some limited niche deployments, it has until recently been unavailable on a broad scale. However, some vendors are now beginning to bring event-driven computing into mainstream IT environments by embedding capabilities into existing service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments.

The result is a new approach called event-driven SOA. Event-driven SOA creates a foundation for applying processes, patterns and business logic to raw data. It combines the request-and-response paradigm of SOA with the publish-and-subscribe model of an event-driven architecture. Event-driven SOA also allows designers to map application design to the business problem, which typically consists of both events and request-response interactions. By combining service orientation and event processing with technologies such as business process management, business activity monitoring and enterprise service buses, event-driven SOA creates extreme agility.

In fact, in a recent survey of IT decision makers, more than 70 percent of respondents indicated that they were already considering event-driven computing in the context of these SOA technologies. Clearly these leading IT organizations are looking toward event-driven SOA as the next step in driving their business at light speed.