Got events, SOA? You need business rules

In Time for event-driven SOA Joe McEndrick summarizes a post by Brenda Michelson

It seems to me, reading these, that a business rules approach to automating operational business decisions would be a very valuable element in an event-driven SOA. Joe quotes Brenda saying:

"The event may signify a problem or impending problem, an opportunity, a threshold, or a deviation. Upon generation, the event is immediately disseminated to all interested parties (human or automated). The interested parties evaluate the event, and optionally take action...A broader event-driven architecture stretches beyond event-driven SOA, to include real-time information flow and analysis, and complex event processing."

One of the things business rules are great for is taking large number of events and then processing them quickly to determine what to do about them - clearly something essential in a real-world example where lots of events are likely to occur. Additionally they are a powerful tool for actually do real-time analysis and complex event processing - something I posted on (CEP) a while back.

Anyway, SOA and event-driven architectures are a great match for a business rules approach and business rules can make the evolution and maintenance of the logic needed by these architectures easier and quicker.