Introducing an Event Mesh to Simplify Digital Transformation

Selecting tools for your business toolbox can be very industry specific, but a few things that businesses have in common across most industries and markets is the need to connect with and serve their customers in real time and be able to evolve that interaction over time with the lowest cost and delivery time possible. 

As consumers of goods and services continue to demand faster and better customer service, companies overlap development cycles and find ways to cost-reduce portions of what they deliver to stay ahead of the curve.  Removing the friction that slows down your implementation teams is key to success with your customers.  

Implementing an event mesh – a network of connected event brokers – can dramatically reduce that friction compared to other approaches, keeping your costs low while maximizing your ability to stimulate change in your digital transformation journey.  

How Does an Event Mesh Work? 

An event mesh is like a super-efficient highway system for data that allows event data to flow only to parts of the mesh where that event is needed. It does this dynamically, meaning that new event types can be added any time, and new interests in events can also be registered, immediately changing the flow of events in real time.

Event brokers that make up the mesh can be running in any environment (data center, private cloud, public cloud, or combination), and are configured to dynamically route data from producing applications to consuming applications without forcing those applications to know about one another, or how they connect to the mesh.

Without an event mesh, attempting to integrate applications can lead to cumbersome and brittle integrations with high maintenance costs and inflexible systems that block change needed for critical business evolution. Past solutions like enterprise message bus platforms fell short in key areas, failing to deliver on important concepts that an event mesh provides.  

Why Should Your Business Focus on Events? 

Events are data messages that represent what is going on in your business. You can think of them as the product orders, payment transactions, inventory changes, or activity data in your business flowing in real time on your network. That could be anywhere your applications run – like custom applications you own running in your data center – or in the cloud software you purchased and installed, or software you receive as a service through a cloud provider.  These events may need immediate response from another application or may just need to be stored for analysis later.  

Events are the life blood of your business and making them freely available across your enterprise enables business teams to more easily pursue important initiatives like digital transformation across your business units. 

Using Solace to Enable an Event Mesh for Your Digital Transformation 

Digital Transformation is all about using automation and continuous improvement to enable business changes that delight customers as they consume your product or service, so they keep coming back.  For example, connecting an online purchase with immediate shipment tracking details delivered via text or email gives a customer confidence that their order is on its way, and when to expect it. A positive digital experience like this will inspire loyalty and trust with the company providing the good or service.

Solace enables an event mesh with PubSub+, our advanced event management platform. You can create an event mesh by deploying PubSub+ in any/all of your environments (public/private clouds, on premises), and then connecting them. This enables all applications, microservices, cloud services, SaaS, iPaaS and legacy systems to be instantly and continuously connected with one another through the event mesh. 

Some benefits to using PubSub+ to enable your event mesh includes the ability for your business to: 

• Scale to 1M events per second 
• Deliver low latency across geographies 
• Dynamic topic namespace and routing on nearly any platform 
• Overlay synchronous transactions on the same infrastructure 
• Automatically compress to limit bandwidth cost and consumption 
• Use out-of-the box integrations for most technologies on nearly any cloud service 
• Gain access to industry-leading capabilities for discovering and managing events 
• Access our ever-growing list of partner integrations 

Solace also offers support for the latest development tools and standards. You can find out more about a Solace-enabled event mesh and PubSub+ Platform on our website.  

In my next blog post, I’ll dive into more detail about digital transformation with some industry examples of how an event mesh enables companies like yours to be successful and accelerate change to grow their business. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out these other posts that will help explain the importance of event-driven architecture in your digital transformation: 

• Why Event-Driven Architecture and an Event Mesh are the Secrets to Successful Digital Transformation 
• How to Develop a Digital Transformation Strategy Based on Event-Driven Architecture 
• What Does It Mean to be Event Driven? Open Your Mind and Unlock New Business Value! 
• White paper: Event Mesh: Event-Driven Architecture for the Real Time Enterprise