Sonos

Challenge

In 2020, Sonos embarked on a digital transformation program that would help them maintain their leadership position in the market by advancing their global operations in the areas of finance, supply chain, and order fulfillment. The program included implementation of a tier-1 ERP system, order management system, and a suite of new enterprise integrations enabling business processes that span a complex system of on-premises, SaaS, and 3rd-party applications. As both a software company and an electronics company, with retail and direct business models, their underlying needs were very complex and their existing point-to-point architecture couldn’t meet their demands.

As such Sonos wanted to move away from their legacy designs, that in many cases were based on scheduled point-to-point integrations utilizing heavy database polling and batch processing. They wanted to implement new architecture patterns that would enable real-time event-driven movement of data across datacenter and application boundaries, let multiple entities subscribe to the same message, provide separation of concerns by breaking down monolithic functionality into microservices, and utilize reliable message queuing capabilities to handle surge scenarios and maintenance windows.

Selection

Sonos brought Solace in to help them meet these challenges for the following reasons:

• Platform capability and maturity ensures reliability at scale while providing tools to make their teams more efficient.
• Ability to integrate multiple applications and protocols using Solace APIs and connectors to lower custom development cost and risk.
• Solace Cloud Managed services deployed in AWS to reduce operational costs.
• Commitment to customer support and onboarding helped ensure success.

Solution

Solace enabled the digital transformation by providing a migration path for applications while reducing costs by queuing events to manage bursts in demand. Solace technology also makes it easy for development teams to isolate brokers so they can develop new capabilities and add them to the event mesh without the risk of errors or outages.

The use cases span both operational delivery of services and corporate back-end systems. Solace delivers on these use cases using an event mesh of interconnected brokers. Events are then intelligently streamed to wherever there are subscribers in a system for master data distribution that is maintained by the middleware and integration team to the delight of the application development teams.

This allows for seamless integration of applications, integration of legacy applications, and a structured path for legacy migration. As they expand their architecture they are publishing more and more events to the event mesh to allow individual development teams to leverage as is best suited for their users needs.

Benefits

API support and partnerships with Boomi and SAP made Solace a perfect fit while the topic structure and event mesh helps them easily scale their integrations. For instance, Sonos’ real-time view of inventory means they can put products in order management significantly faster and give customers a better buying experience – critical for hot new products and peak buying seasons.

By taking an event-driven approach with the help of Solace’s technology, they can integrate systems across countries and suppliers in manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, retailing and more. Integrating their best-of-breed ERP, CRM, e-commerce, manufacturing, and fulfillment systems lets their enterprise systems team help the organization maintain leadership in their markets.