New Click-to-Connect Wizard Makes It Easy to Integrate Azure and AWS Services for a Personalized Retail Experience

Most enterprises use cloud services in their event-driven architecture to remain competitive and continually deliver personalized products while maintaining operational excellence. These services range from data ingestion to machine learning to messaging-as-a-service. Using these cloud services requires connectivity to and integration with on-premises applications and systems.

Many of our customers who have already deployed PubSub+ event brokers take advantage of hybrid cloud architecture and are now looking for a simple connector that is easy to set up. REST is a common, open protocol most of these cloud services integrate with and connect to. PubSub+ event broker’s REST Delivery Point (RDP) is a perfect example. RDP acts as a service that will listen on the topic subscriptions of interest and automatically publish messages to webhook endpoints, which can be in any cloud service.

With the latest release of PubSub+, we’ve added a new “click-to-connect” wizard that makes it easy to connect to a wide variety of cloud environments and services. It can currently connect to AWS API Gateway, Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus, and Azure Event Hubs – with more to come!

The click-to-connect wizard lets architects discover cloud services they can connect to, and identify, configure and manage the required related components.

Real-Time Event Streaming Creates Opportunities for Automation

Imagine what you could do if the information you wanted customers to receive was automatically detected (based on an event) and then delivered to them when they need it the most? Could be a promo code, online signup, or WiFi access request. Event-driven architecture can help you automatically send customers relevant alerts and promotions based on their location and activity, and even do so proactively based on what they’re likely to do considering their known patterns and preferences. I have personally experienced this when walking into a sporting goods store: when I scanned my membership code at the door, I was immediately offered a personalized list of promotions while I was shopping. Needless to say, I bought more than I intended to!

An event broker can also help to detect areas of interest within the operation. Are the lines too long at the change room or the cash register? IoT sensors can detect the number of people waiting in specific zones and report based on a pre-set threshold. This is a perfect example how you can use IoT devices to detect an event (e.g., when there are more than five customers in line), then trigger a SMS alert to the store manager to do whatever is needed to reduce the lines!

The key here is to streamline and improve any activities that would improve your customers’ shopping and buying journey. Whether fixing something negative or promoting something positive, all that matters is customers leave happy. If you win customers over through operational excellence, they will always come back.

In the latest Solace PubSub+ event broker (version 9.8) we have made it easy to integrate a REST connector from our event broker into Azure Event Hub with only a few clicks. All you need to do is decide on which topic (area of interests) you want to automatically be sent to Azure Event Hubs for consumer behavior analysis, or promotion automation. The beauty is you only need to set this up once, and all of the topics of events will be streamed into Azure automatically.

In addition, a summary page that outlines all of your REST components within the PubSub+ event broker is there to browse.

This makes it easy to add, edit, and remove topic, or setup new applications to consume these messages.

Why Should Companies Personalize the Customer Experience?

Everyone likes a personal touch, especially when it comes to their buying habits and preferences. The ability to narrow down your offers to what your customers want – at the right time – is golden.

Azure Databricks is a well-established data science tool. Companies of all sizes rely on it to analyze buying patterns, consumer insights and correlation between product lines and promotions. These insights are exceptionally valuable, and are more powerful if they are captured, analyzed, and executed with a faster response time.

By enabling a REST connector from a PubSub+ event broker to Azure Event Hubs, Service Bus, and Azure functions, these integration points allow your business to further your research into your customers’ journey, tapping into insightful information that used to be an after thought. Real-time integration between the event broker and Azure opens the floodgates to new insights into consumer behaviour and the ability to react in real-time.