As global information systems become ever more powerful, complex, and intertwined, companies need new approaches to extracting information, transforming it into intelligence, and acting on it. David Luckham introduces a breakthrough solution that offers compelling benefits at every level and scale of the enterprise: Complex Event Processing (CEP). Luckham first identifies key challenges faced by today's enterprise information systems, and demonstrates the "event-driven" nature of management in the electronic enterprise. He then introduces CEP, showing how it can harness the power of events to automate management without compromising managers' control. Luckham illuminates fundamental concepts such as events, causality, event hierarchies, event patterns, and rules; then shows how these concepts can be used to solve key enterprise management problems. In Part III, he presents a realistic description of what it takes to build CEP applications that scale to real world problems, introducing the new RAPIDE event pattern language. The book concludes with detailed case studies that show Luckham's CEP tools at work in the enterprise.