WHITE PAPER

Improved decision making using

Event Processing Platform
- Praveen Kumar
Introduction
As the Multi Service Operators (MSO)
companies march ahead through the
current economic uncertainty, there is a lot
of focus to reduce their operational costs.
At the same time improve their customer
experience with new products and services.
So what are the most common problems
that these companies are trying to address?
Based on research by Gartner and our
own interactions with a lot of clients in
this industry, the below seem to be on top
priority for most of them -
Enhance customer experience
through
value added features
Reduce call center volumes
and costs,
by pro-active event monitoring
Achieve real-time visibility on
potential
revenue impacting events to either
improve potential sales or reduce
churn
Improved speed to
cash new products
and services like Interactive TV
Both the business and IT sides of the
organization are trying to find meaningful
ways to address the above priorities. One
such way is to create an IT solution that
empowers business by providing visibility
into key events as they occur within an
enterprise for improved decision making.
The solution would be able to correlate
the events/triggers occurring within
an enterprise in real-time which drive
meaningful outcomes for the business to
act on.
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Todays increasingly competitive
environment has helped the consumer
to be able to move across brands and
products almost seamlessly. The digital
consumer is more informed, resulting in
higher expectations in terms of the overall
end-user experience from his service
provider. As a result the organizations
need to innovate and improve to provide
an improved customer experience and
optimize costs at the same time. This
is where companies will need to have
insight into their business process and
the information flowing through these
processes for them to make more informed
and timely decision making.
As enterprises continue to adopt event
driven architecture a scenario is created
where there are a versatile set of events
being generated by different systems
within an organization. For instance for
a Cable company, these events could be
those generated by the set-top boxes
when - a subscriber tunes into a particular
channel, responds to a survey or an
advertisement, orders specific pay per view
content, new service orders etc. Or if we
look at other industries such as utilities the
events could be those generated by smart
meters, i.e. a meter reading going beyond a
set threshold or events to indicate demand
spikes etc.
With all this information and data available
to an organization it could be turned into
very powerful insight and action yet few
business are acting on it. For example lets
take the instances of customer experience,
one of the key focus of todays enterprises.
Traditionally, a customer calls for an issue
in current service to the CSR to initiate
a new ticket. It normally takes from few
hours to a week based on the request for
it to be acknowledged and completed.
In todays situation, the channels for a
customer to connect with customer care
are very nimble (IM, self-service, web, etc).
The turn-around-time for acknowledging
and responding to the issue effectively
should also be quick enough. One way
of improving this is to be able to pro-
actively identify an issue in the service
through monitoring of certain events and
triggers generated by end user devices like
set-top boxes. By correlating the events
and identifying potential problems, the
customer care can engage the consumer
early on such issues even before they
actually happen. This will help improve
the overall customer experience, but also
potentially reduce the call center volume.
Organizations need to leverage their
existing investments to create solutions
and platforms that not only provide pro-
active visibility into certain events but also
support newer products and services.
A carefully constructed event processing
platform is one way to tackle these
challenges, but how do you get started,
how can an organization approach this and
what are the pros and cons?.
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What is an Event Processing
Platform?
The Event Processing Platform solution was
primarily conceived for organizations having
business applications, capable of generating
business events directly (out of the box) or
indirectly (through additional development)
and include multiple source channels like in
the case of an MSO. The solution is designed
to capture business events occurring within
an enterprise, correlate, enrich and create
meaningful outcomes for the business to
act on. The below diagram provides a high
level view of what the solution would look
like for a typical organization.
As outlined in the above diagram, the
solution consists of a few key modules.
Each of these modules handle specific
functionality and described below.
The Event Delivery Network comprises of
the engineering network infrastructure
and the various channels which are
responsible for delivering the event data
from the source systems. This module
could be set of systems and applications
which are responsible for connecting the
external facing engineering systems and
networks with the internal IT applications
of an organization. This module typically
could include the following among other
things, the delivery infrastructure which
manages the signal path along the network,
end user systems which are responsible
for generating the events, Conduit servers
acting as an event gateway for various
channels etc. Example: In case of an MSO
this constitutes the video engineering
infrastructure.
The Event Aggregation & Processing
Platform is one of the key pieces in the
overall solution, which is responsible for
capturing the event messages routed by the
delivery network. This platform is responsible
for capturing, aggregating and correlating
the incoming events with application
metadata and customer data to derive
meaningful information for an enterprise.
There could be an optional enrichment of
the event data (based on the event type and
the application associated with it).
The platform could typically include a
Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine
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Customer Data
Subscriber Data
Meta Data
Application
Meta Data
Event Delivery Module
Managers
Reporting Module
Internet
Mobile Network
Event Aggregation & Processing Module
Reporting
Dashboard
Process Work ow Call Center
Alerts & Events
Delivery Infrastructure
Event Cache
ESB
CEP
Home TV Network
Downstream Module
Downstream &
3rd Party External
Systems
Field Agents
Figure 1: Event Processing Platform
along with BPM-EAI products. CEP enables
in analyzing the event stream and deriving
patterns out of them, to identify if the
events match a particular pattern. Such
events could then be fed into a workflow,
governed by specific business rules for
aggregating the events and derive a
meaningful outcome.
Customer Data Module holds the
information for the customer profile details
like - the Customer name and address,
device and asset information associated
with the customer (MAC address, device
information etc.). Usually this could typically
be a CRM system in an organization which
would be the system of record for the
customer data.
The Reporting Module can provide
a dashboard view of things that are
happening within the enterprise in real
time. The correlated data from previous
modules can be fed into this module for
appropriate reporting to the stakeholder
teams. In essence this module will be the
consumer of the aggregated and enriched
events for defining actionable outcomes.
This could include business activity
monitoring (BAM) dashboards, alerting
modules for proactive monitoring by the
stakeholders etc. The alerting activity could
be integrated with other applications to
notify key stakeholder teams like Call Center,
Field Agents, Managers etc., on specific
happenings in a business process within an
enterprise to be acted on.
Downstream Modules can be the consumer
systems which act on the enriched
information. Further on, once the responses
are aggregated, processed and enriched,
the aggregation platform will need to
integrate with downstream systems for
consumption of this data.
How has a leading Cable firm benefitted from an Event
Processing Approach?
The company specializes in cable and
broadband services across the US region.
As part of clients business focus for
enhanced user experience, they had
planned to launch a series of interactive
TV applications as part of their offering,
staring with interactive advertising.
Interactive advertising is an innovative
product, where in TV viewers can interact
with advertises in real time by providing
their choices and opinions on the
advertised products. As part of this journey
the key focus items for IT to support this
program by building a processing engine
for the user responses.
The solution implemented to support the
interactive TV application was based on
Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format
(EBIF) standard, which is an industry
standard specification for defining
multimedia content. The interactive
TV applications create enhanced TV
experience to the end users, by allowing
them to interact with programs being
aired through set-top boxes, using their
remotes. The various types of interactive
applications include - pure TV based
interactive applications like Request
for Information (RFI) via Interactive
Advertising, Polling, Trivia, Voting etc. or
TV integration with Online applications
such as Interactive Bidding, Social Media
(integration with facebook, twitter etc.).
Requirement:
As part of the interactive TV applications
initiative the requirement for the client was
to build a solution to capture, correlate
and aggregate user responses to the
programs aired, provide visibility into any
network issues that might impact the TV
signals reaching user set-top box, generate
summary reporting for each advertising
campaign for user participation and their
responses.
RFI is an interactive, information gathering
and brand engagement tool that lets
marketers gain quick, actionable consumer
insights through in-Ad questions and
letting viewers interact with the questions
via their remote controller (for set-top box).
Key to the success of this program was the
implementation of two key platforms, a
video engineering and an IT platform.
The video engineering platform was made
up of the video engineering and signal
path network setup for encoding the
advertising content and relaying them to
the end user set-top boxes. The key part
to this is the user agent application that
is built into the set-top boxes. The user
agents are responsible for de-coding the
interactive Ads and display them onto
the end user TV screens as a non-intrusive
splash bars. They are also responsible for
capturing the selections made as part of
the user interaction via the set-top box
remote controller. These selections are
then converted into an event with key
information (like the set-top box address,
user selection data, receiver info etc.) for
a particular Ad campaign and relay them
to the internal IT applications for further
processing.
The second key feature of the user agent
was to generate the iEvents from the user
set-top box. An iEvent is a response event
generated against a standard (dummy)
campaign across the MSOs nationwide
network (this is similar to a ping on a
network), from the user set-top boxes. The
iEvents are then aggregated to create a
statistical map to generate the signal path
matrix across the MSO network. This will
help identify any potential issues with the
signal path for a specific region. This helps
in pro-active monitoring of the signal path
network and to take corrective actions.
This in turn reduces the possibility of an
event not reaching the intended target
audience, thereby reducing potential call
center volumes and resulting in a better
user experience.
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The IT Platform is an event aggregation and enrichment platform which forms the key component in an overall interactive advertising
solution. This platform incorporates the business workflows and logic to capture, process and enrich the interactive responses from the end
user devices and generate the fulfillment request for the customers. It also generates statistical metrics based on the events and report the
to the stakeholder teams/applications. For example an advertiser might be interested in knowing how many customers were tuned into
the channel where the Ad campaign was played on, how many participated in the campaign, how many did not, what type of customers
participated in the Ad campaign etc. This type of information can be invaluable for the advertisers in developing targeted Ad campaigns. The
high level solution is outlined below:
Subscriber Data Module
Subscriber Data
Meta Data Module
Campaign Meta Data
Event Delivery Module
Event Aggregation & Enrichment
Reporting Module
BAM Dashboard
Oracle BPEL
2-Way Conduit
Servers
Home TV
Network
Event Data
Store
(Oracle DB)
COH Data Grid
OSB
Downstream Module
Ful llment
House
Statistical
Measurement
Figure 2: Interactive Advertisement Processing Platform for MSO
The solution was built on a typical BPM-EAI
product suite, in this case Oracle Fusion
Middleware for aggregating the user
events based on the type of campaign.
The event processing platform constituted
key components that made up the end to
end solution. Like the Event Cache, a highly
available in-memory cache grid that was
built using Oracle Coherence, to enable the
delivery module to post the events in real
time without any latency. The event cache,
since it is an in-memory data grid provides
a very high performance throughput along
with being scalable (supports both vertical
and horizontal scaling).
The Event Data Store is the holding area
for the user events that are captured by
the event cache and written into the event
tables on the data store. The data store was
built on Oracle RAC DB for high availability
and load balanced. The DB was designed
not only to handle large volumes of data
and but also support faster reads/writes by
applying appropriate partitioning and index
strategies.
The Process Workflow component was
built using Oracle BPEL, incorporating
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orchestration and workflow logic for event
processing. The process component would,
based on the campaign type, execute
the appropriate workflow to aggregate
and enrich the user events based on
business rules defined and route them to
the appropriate downstream application
and/or external entities. In this case, the
process component involved workflow
for processing the interactive Ad response
events for the RFI application which
included - the workflow would sweep the
events from the event data store for every
campaign, enrich the event data with
additional information from subscriber
module (subscriber data warehouse) and
campaign meta data, apply the business
rules to aggregate the events (Eg: aggregate
the events by zip code) to create the
fulfillment map for qualifying events, create
the statistical map for the events based on
the business criterion defined to provide
additional sampling information on the user
interaction. Eg: User response measurement
for a campaign, User product preferences,
demographic data etc.
The Enterprise Service Bus forms the
core integration layer. This component
was built using Oracle Service Bus (OSB),
and was responsible for integration of
the process component with the event
data store, subscriber module, campaign
meta-data module etc. Along with that it
was responsible more importantly for
connectivity with the external fulfillment
house and the statistical processing house.
It was also responsible for handling the
security using client & server certificates
for connectivity with external systems.
The reporting module primarily constituted
of the Reporting Dashboard, designed using
the Oracle BAM component. The dashboard
would give the business team a high level
view into how a campaign went through
and also measure response across the
demography. It provided a view of -
The total number of
positive
fulfillments created for a particular
campaign
The statistical view of
the campaign
response from users
Any exceptions as
part of the workflow
Key Benefits of the Solution
The platform was built to address certain key objectives to benefit the business. The solution had to not only scale to the existing subscriber
volume, but also be scalable for future expansion. Some of the key performance indicators and the benefits achieved by the solution are
outlined below.
Key Performance Indicator
User Response Volumes
Transaction Throughput
DB Size
Fulfillment Map SLA
Statistical Map SLA
Geography Covered
Performance Achieved
10 Million (2 M Positives)
32000 Transactions/Second
1.5 Billion Records
< 8 Minutes
< 7 Minutes
US National
Details
The sample size was 10 M responses with 2 M positive responses
Transaction rate processed and persisted into the event data store
Number of records in the event data store to be filtered for events
for a particular campaign
Per campaign placement
Per campaign placement
For national campaign footprint
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How can the solution help organizations?
Although the example just mentioned
is a cable company the approach can
be applied to other industries where
business events correlate with measurable
business outcomes. Below are some of the
advantages that can be gained out of such
a platform -
re-routing a field agent to address a critical
event in the same neighborhood as he is
currently servicing etc.
Such pro-active interventions would
enhance the relationship with subscribers
and improve loyalty and trust. This would
also ensure that by engaging the customers
through pro-active communication, the
overall support calls from the customer can
also be reduced, resulting in lowering costs
to the company.
on user behavior to generate the following
insight:
Audience measurement
for a particular
program or advertisement
Capture and build
demographic maps,
based on user choices
Build a feedback loop
with the end-
users based on their interactions
This kind of intelligence can be invaluable to
program content providers and advertisers
alike, so they can identify a target audience
for particular program or an advert based
on demographics etc.
Improve Customer Experience:
For example the use case of Construct
Signal Path Map explained in the above
case study can be leveraged to identify
issues with the signal paths within the MSO
network. In case of any issues identified,
pro-actively create notifications to the
stakeholder teams (like the networking
teams, call center agents and/or field
agents) to alert them on such issues. The
actions could be - pro-actively analyze and
identify any network/application related
issues, communicate to the impacted
subscribers on issues and communicate
corrective measures, dispatching the
engineers to check the specific locality/
zip code in question for any impending
problems in the network, notify the call
center agents about the issue and affected
areas/zip codes, so they can offer improved
customer service to the related issues.
Today field technicians are mobile enabled
and reaching out to them is much easier
than ever before. This can be leveraged
to an organizations benefit, for example
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Support New Products and Services:
The solution can be extended to support
other event based use cases like Voting
(voting for MVP during NFL matches),
Polling & Trivia etc. The platform can
support nationwide advertising campaign
as well local advertising. The platform can
be extended beyond the realm of the above
mentioned products by defining new
rules and workflows that govern the event
processing for those products and services.
These rules and workflows can be easily
plugged into the existing platform.
Support for Mobility:
With the widespread adoption of mobile
devices, the customer interactions with
media content happen more on mobile
platforms than the traditional TVs. The event
processing platform solution discussed here
is not tied to any particular channel of input.
The event stream could be generated either
from a set-top box, a mobile device (mobile
phone, tablets etc.) or even from a website.
As long as the event conforms to a pre-
defined meta-data structure, the solution
can process them.
Enhanced business intelligence:
The solution can be leveraged to build
intelligence to create value based
information for the business. For example, in
case of cable companies - the platform can
be leveraged to aggregate the events based
Solution Implementation Strategies
This section outlines the different options that are available to an enterprise looking to build the Event Processing Platform solution. There
typically could be two broad strategies that organizations can look at in terms of implementing the even processing platform an On-Premise
Implementation or Cloud Implementation. Below are few pros and cons of these approaches.
PROS CONS
1. Higher initial development cost
for the solution from scratch, this
includes hardware, software licensing
and application development costs
2. Recurring yearly maintenance cost,
again includes hardware, software
licensing and application support
costs
3. Might result in sub-optimal
utilization of resources (hardware,
software and labor)
4. IT is only an enabler for MSOs and
not a core business operation
On-Premise Development
This is typical in house development by
organizations as part of their IT spends.
This involves application development
by the IT teams.
1. Organizations have full control on
the design and development of the
application
2. All the modules will be within the
organizational domain, bringing
them together as part of an end-end
solution, hence might be straight
forward
Cloud based Implementation
This is an alternative approach, where
in enterprises can look at working with
IT partners like Infosys in realizing the
platform as a service (cloud offering)
and pay as you go model.
1. There might be minimal or no
upfront implementation costs to the
organizations
2. No recurring support or
maintenance costs
3. Reduced TCO with a pay as you go
model
4. Flexibility in extending the platform
for other types of channels like
internet based programs, mobile
media etc., without worrying about
scalability.
1. Data security and privacy concerns
would need to be addressed
possibly through encryption, non-
disclosure agreements etc.
2. Enterprises might need to adhere
to the standard interfacing models
provided by the cloud services
3. Organizations might have to
implement basic services on their
side like the subscriber data
module for the enrichment of the
user responses to be used by the
cloud services
The right strategy for implementing the platform for a particular organization depends on other factors such as type of functionality being
implemented, the scale and scope of the solution etc. While the right approach will need to be evaluated for a particular organization, the cloud
based option has some obvious advantages. The primary of them is to relieve the organizations from investing their resources on platform
implementation and allow them to focus on their core business for example selling ad slots. A cloud based approach will help the client to
bring down their overall total cost of ownership (TCO) as they dont have to invest in hardware, software or application development.
Having the Event Processing Platform on a cloud would open new opportunities for the client organizations and the System Integration (SI)
partners alike. SI partners can also add a lot of value by offering cloud based services for such a platform. They can especially leverage their
service offering capabilities for realizing an effective cloud platform for their clients.
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Conclusion
The Event Processing Platform can provide
an impetus to organizations in realizing
their business objectives discussed earlier
along with cost optimization. The solution
provides a platform to address the key
problem areas for business, at the same time
be able to scale up for new products and
services. This helps organizations to improve
customer experience and reduce their Total
Cost of Ownership (TCO) as well. Enterprises
can get innovative in realizing the solution
by adopting cloud implementation
strategy and leverage their SI partners, like
Infosys. Partners like Infosys, with their vast
experience in this domain and ability to
host cloud based solutions, can be an ideal
choice for organizations looking to build the
Event Processing Platform to address their
key business objectives.
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About the Author
Praveen Kumar
is a Principal Consultant with the Infosys Consulting & Systems Integration unit. He has
led many client engagements for strategizing and implementing SOA/EAI solutions for
large-scale IT programs and consults with various clients from across verticals. He can
be contacted at praveenkumar_pj@infosys.com
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