For many years IBM integration capabilities have been available separately, but also as part of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, which offers as flexible licensing option, as well as optimised container deployments, as well as included OpenShift entitlements.
Included in Cloud Pak for Integration were some capabilities to help customers detect and react to business events in real time: IBM Event Streams and IBM Event Endpoint Management. These features provided Apache Kafka brokers as well as supporting AsyncAPIs to allow Events to be published as self-service APIs, enabling businesses to more easily detect and make use of events by making use of them in new API driven applications.
In 2023 IBM extended the potential for event-led integration by releasing IBM Event Automation which provided not just Event Streams and Event Endpoint Management but added a new component: Event Processing. This new component, incorporating Apache Flink allows for users such as business analysts to make use of a simple low-code visual editor to create and deploy event-based solutions.
On October 29th 2024 IBM announced IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Event Processing Add-On. This new part provides the Event Processing component, previously only available in IBM Event Automation, and it also includes entitlement to Red Hat OpenShift. This combination means that customers with both Cloud Pak for Integration and this new Event Processing Add-On have everything they need to deploy any or all of the event integration components into Red Hat OpenShift where they can build and deploy powerful event-based solutions, which can then be used if required with the rest of the integration capabilities in Cloud Pak for Integration, where the output from Event Processing might be used to trigger other key business actions.
Key points about the Event Processing Add-On include that it is a composable solution, and therefore can be used with any other suitable Kafka provider, and the Add-On offers both a 50% discount for non-production deployments, and use for development or FV deployments is not charged. For each VPC of the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Event Processing Add-On purchased, the customer gets entitlement to 3 cores of Red Hat OpenShift for deploying the Event Processing components.