What is CEP

E-Business research and practice can be situated on following multiple levels: applications, technological issues, support and implementation (Ngai and Wat 2002). Here we consider technological components for realizing business processes and discuss their foundation architecture for technological enabling. The article provides an introduction to the terms, techniques and realization issues for eventdriven and service-oriented architectures. We begin with a definition of terms and propose a reference architecture for an event-driven service-oriented architecture (EDSOA). Possible applications in the area of E-Business and solution guidelines are considered in the second part of the article. Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) have gained momentum since their introduction in the last years. Seen as an approach to integrate heterogeneous applications within an enterprise architecture they are also used to design flexible and adaptable business processes. An SOA is designed as a distributed system architecture providing a good integration possibility of already existing application systems. Furthermore, SOA is mostly suitable for complex and large system landscapes.