As a proud Canadian and lifelong hockey player, my favorite athlete of all time is Wayne Gretzky. As it happens, his oft-quoted advice about “skating to where the puck is going to be” is a good summation of my goal and role as Solace’s CTO. In recent discussions with countless customers, partners and analysts, it’s become increasingly clear that the puck – in terms of the enterprise IT – is heading toward events.
Yes, event-driven architecture has been around for a while, but it’s only really caught on in the most demanding spaces like capital markets, gaming, payments and IoT, where the need for agility, speed, scalability and robustness are all mission critical. The convergence of trends like cloud, mobile, IoT and microservices is making these attributes more important to all businesses, and making events and event-driven architecture essential for all modern enterprises.
I see the recognition of this importance on both the technology and business sides of the house:
There’s a pretty big problem, however: building event-driven applications is hard. Why? If you look at the world of API-led applications, you’ll find all kinds of platforms, tools and know-how that help you build and run them – portals and platforms and tools that just don’t exist in the event-driven arena. My colleague Jonathan Schabowsky recently explained this phenomenon in a series of blog posts, but for my purposes I’ll just say that this shortcoming inspired a strategic initiative we’re calling Event Horizon.
With Event Horizon we’re packaging up everything we’ve built and learned over the last 15 years to provide all of the technology, tools and know-how it takes to accelerate and simplify the development of event-driven applications. As I mentioned earlier we’ve been working with customers and partners at the leading edge of events, and I know we’ve got a lot to offer. There are four key elements of Event Horizon:
I’m excited about how Event Horizon will make it easier to design, build and deploy event-driven applications, and help businesses reap the rewards of becoming event-driven. To learn more, visit solace.com/event-horizon.