Extreme transaction processing (XTP) is being added to complex event processing (CEP) in service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations for the financial services industry, explains David Chappell, vice president and chief technologist for SOA at Oracle Corp. Chappell: "What we're seeing is that SOA coupled with a class of applications coined as extreme transaction processing or XTP is the future for financial services infrastructure. So IT continues to be seen as the enabler. We've seen some supporting data from Gartner/DataQuest that IT spending in financial services is going to reach $566 billion by 2010. Where SOA comes into the picture is that it enables IT to deliver new business services faster, while leveraging existing systems.

"At the same time the financial institutions are pushing limits that require more processing capability yet at the same time they don't want to see an exponential rise in their investment in hardware. So the extreme transaction processing class of applications has been most notably seen in areas such as fraud detection, risk computation and stock trade resolution...

"What XTP does is allow transactions to occur in memory and not against the backend systems directly due to the need for extremely fast response rates, but still including transactional integrity. So think of classes of applications that need to handle large volumes of data that need to be absorbed, correlated and acted upon. Typically that data processed by XTP applications comes in the form of large numbers of events and usually represents data that changes frequently... once the pattern matching engine, whether it's built directly into the XTP application itself or is identified by the complex event processing engine, is it identifies an event of significance such as ATM withdrawal
fraud.

"Say for example your ATM card is used in different ATM machines or is used to make purchases in three or four states or even different countries within a matter of minutes, that's usually a flag that some kind of fraud is going on. Once that kind of a situation is detected then an SOA process in BPEL can be kicked off to make the proper notification, send alerts to Business Activity Monitoring dashboards..."

Read the complete interview by Rich Seeley in SearchSOA.com.