Dimensional Data

People, events, the human brain—in fact, the whole world operate in real-time, but businesses have struggled to keep up. With the help of event-driven architecture (EDA) and the Open API economy, businesses can now do the same. The power of an event-driven world means that, after years of geopolitical events affecting how businesses operate, many businesses are starting to uncover real value by truly being able to operate in real-time. Whether it be retail and manufacturing or energy and resources and financial services, locating and responding to vital issues within a company’s supply chains or product lines in real-time, is key to success. Amazon’s CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels, said that “the world is event driven” in his keynote speech at AWS re:Invent in December 2022. Now, new IDC research unveils that nine out of 10 of the world’s largest companies will deploy real-time intelligence driven by event-streaming technologies by 2025. But What’s the Secret Behind Such Success? A recent IDC Infobrief, sponsored by Solace, surveyed over 300 enterprise IT professionals in North America, Asia and Europe, all of whom work for large companies implementing or considering EDA. The results are quite telling–an overwhelming 93% of respondents at companies that have deployed EDA across multiple use cases said EDA has either met or exceeded their expectations. In addition to technical advantages from EDA, most businesses also see clear business benefits: A full 23% of respondents reported increasing productivity; 22% said better customer acquisition and 18% saw revenues increase as a result of EDA efforts. 1. Get Support From the Top to Ensure Alignment Throughout Expanding the footprint of EDA across the enterprise is a journey, and every journey starts by assembling those that are critical to its overall success. Business sponsorship and engaging key stakeholders is vital, especially in the early days of EDA adoption – 56% of respondents in the early EDA stages cited this as a priority when ROI and business benefits may not be immediately clear. The impact of well-aligned C-suite, operational and technical teams is reflective of business-level digital maturity, too. As 35% of respondents at an advanced stage of EDA rollout felt C-level support was critical, it comes as no surprise that respondents with higher levels of EDA maturity also have higher levels of overall digital maturity, including digital strategy and change management support. 2. Tackle Complexities Head-On With the Backing of IT As EDA becomes more pervasive across an organization, demands on IT become more sophisticated, requiring a deepening of EDA skills in the IT organization, notably with DevOps teams, developers and architects. More than one-third (36.1%) of respondents cited the lack of skills to execute EDA as a hurdle to adoption. Approaches to logging, governance and oversight (30.7%) can also become increasingly challenging and must be thought through carefully. This is where EDA providers themselves need to step up and provide adequate training and a certification path for architects DevOps and developers looking to gain the fundamental knowledge and skills to design and implement event-driven systems. This should include technical details such as understanding various design patterns for EDA, microservices choreography versus orchestration, the saga pattern and RESTful microservices. Education should also clearly define and demonstrate key concepts and tools for EDA success, such as event portal, topic hierarchy best practices and event mesh. […]