A colleague just directed me to this Infosys white paper entitled "Adaptive and Intelligent Retailing - Beyond the Basics with EDA and CEP". It was published a year ago, and I'm surprised I haven't run across it until now. It's an easy read and paints a very clear picture about how event processing and an event driven architecture can add value through increased agility and responsiveness in a retail enterprise. The basic premise is that retail is a very data driven industry, but today it relies largely on BI tools that are providing insight into what happened yesterday or last week, whereas event processing and an EDA can unlock additional value in the data by enabling the enterprise to respond immediately to what's happening. If you're interested in retail - have a look.
