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Transcript: Welcome to all you CIOs and technical leaders out there. My name is Shawn McAllister and I’m the Chief Technology Officer at Solace.

We’ve been helping our customers with their digital transformation journeys for some time now, customers that include the FAA, RBC, SAP and Daimler.

Very prominent in their digital transformation is a transition to an event-centric architecture from a data-centric architecture. An event-centric architecture is one where applications feed off events in real-time as they occur in your business, as opposed to being centered on the database and relying on end-of-day batch jobs and ETL.

This trend is now so prominent that Gartner says that by 2022, event-sourced, real-time situational awareness will be a required characteristic for over 70% of new digital business solutions, and 80% of business ecosystems (as you work with your partners) will require support for event processing.

In fact, I believe that events will become so fundamentally important to your business that they will be the lifeblood of your new applications—whether for customer engagement, offers, process optimization, engagement with your factories, restaurants, point of sale and, of course, your existing systems of record that will also produce events.

At the same time, the IT landscape is becoming much more complicated and much more distributed. Now you have non-cloud, private cloud and oftentimes multiple public clouds.

And to get the most from the events flowing throughout your enterprise, these events need to flow freely throughout the fragmented landscape that is becoming the norm, and they need to be accessible to a rich set of ever-changing applications.

That means any app deployed anywhere in your landscape must be able to generate events, and these events need to be consumed by any other application deployed anywhere else (whether it’s your non-cloud, private cloud or your public clouds).

And they have to be produced and consumed between your brand new microservices, your IoT devices, machine learning applications, delivered to SaaS apps like Salesforce and, of course, have your existing systems of record interact with all of these.

Altogether, this means event distribution should not be an afterthought or done in a niche or a one-off, ad hoc manner. Event distribution needs to be thought through in a strategic way.

Your event infrastructure needs to be easily accessed from anywhere; it needs to have security, robustness, performance and governance all built in. This type of event distribution methodology is called an event mesh.

An event mesh is an architectural layer in your IT stack that routes events from producers to consumers in a reliable, flexible and governed way, no matter where your applications are deployed and no matter what services are part of your landscape.

This event mesh is created by a network of event brokers.

At Solace, we produce event brokers that are trusted by brand names in banking and telco, in manufacturing and government, and they’ve been proven in the most demanding applications.

The key differentiators of a Solace-enabled event mesh are that it is dynamic, open, and simple.

Dynamic means that we have the ability to intelligently and adaptively route events from where they are produced to where they need to be consumed without having to do any configuration, and with features like WAN optimization built right into the technology.

Open means we support many rich and open interfaces so we can integrate with all kinds of applications and IoT devices, but without locking you in because we know you’ve had enough of vendor lock-in.

And by simple, we mean our technology is simple to deploy, simple to use, and simple to manage. It has massive scale and performance, so there are fewer moving pieces and fewer things to go wrong. And we have so many features built into our event brokers that it simplifies your application development because you don’t need to build those features into your apps.

So I invite you to learn more about event-centric architectures, event brokers and event meshes from the resources that are below, and in particular from the Gartner paper on event brokers which is a great place to start.

You can also contact me directly to talk further about event-centric architectures and the tools and techniques needed to achieve that.

With that, I wish you good luck on your journey to becoming an event-centric organization!

Thank you.