Event Processor Solution

This is not a bid solicitation. This RFI will not necessarily result in any procurement action. A contract will not result from this activity.

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is seeking feedback from the vendor community on the availability of an Event Processor solution to streamline and centralize the processing and storage of events. 

Vendors are requested to provide specific responses to the product questions outlined herein. Vendors are requested to provide product whitepapers if available.

The objective of this Request for Information (RFI) is to gather the most current information possible from industry on the different Event Processor solutions as it relates to the CRA’s vision to implement a standard approach for managing events going forward.

The key objectives of the RFI include:

1. Receive responses from the vendor community about available solutions;
2. Get a better understanding of the current and future trends; and
3. Vendors who establish via their response to the RFI how their products(s) meet the solution requirements may be invited to provide an interactive demonstration and discuss in detail how their solutions meet the listed requirements.

Introduction

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) Business & Enterprise Solutions Directorate (BESD) Division in the Information Technology Branch is the Agency’s lead for investigating an Event Processor solution for the Agency to facilitate information sharing between CRA’s applications while improving security, interface standardization and scalability. 

Objective of Request For Information

The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to gather information on industry capabilities related to processing of events.

The CRA is exploring the possibility of acquiring an Event Processor tool(s) to standardize and lay the foundation for utilizing event processing and event data to increase self-service, detect fraud, and improve the services offered to taxpayers and benefit recipients.

Background Information

The CRA is noticing a shift in government, industry and client expectations as to how services are offered and how information is shared. Through public opinion research (POR), the CRA understands that clients/taxpayers are looking for more ease of use and reassurance when it comes to communicating with the Agency. Moving towards an event driven architecture will help to address the client/taxpayers’ communication concern with the Agency. The main objective is to streamline the information exchange process while improving security, interface standardization and scalability. 

At the core, the CRA is expecting to achieve the following benefits from the centralized events processing solution:

• Facilitate information sharing across GC departments
• Faster development and reduced costs because the solution does not have to be rebuilt each time
• Simplified and less costly BI services as data is available from a single source
• Decision making as key information is available in one place to everyone who needs it
• Improved ability to detect fraud faster
• The ability to make more accurate and timely decisions and to correlate and analyze events to identify patterns
• Enhance the analytics and reporting abilities across the Agency

Requirements

The new solution is expected to eliminate service and maintenance costs associated with standalone processes, and provide the opportunity to store and manage event data at a centralized location.

Capabilities:

• Receive/Deliver – receive/deliver events from/to different applications in a standard format
• Display – Prepare events for displaying certain events in applications such as My Account.
• Store/Archive – ability to store/archive events data in database
• Evaluate – apply business rules to handle events
  • Take action – Each event will be actioned as per the rules and registration details. Forward event data to event delivery component.
  • Consolidate – correlate events, either notify subscribers or create a new event.
• Subscription service – Allows subscribers to register to events and manage their subscription and preferences.
  • Manage message – Retrieving subscriber’s preferences, invoking necessary services to prepare the message, delivering to delivery systems like email, text etc.
• Rules management – Ability to manage events processing rules including, but not limited to, pre-defined patterns, validation, filtering etc. Rules need to be stored in a centralized rules repository.

Reporting, Analytics – Reporting on event processing from an operational, performance measurement, and business analytics view.

Potential Use Cases: Describe how your solution can be used to implement following use cases:

• Legacy mainframe Applications using event-driven Architecture
• To mimic Business Process Modelling
• Fraud Detection