Improving customer experience and operational efficiency with real-time data.

In 2020, Sonos embarked on a digital transformation program to 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, which 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 movement of data across applications and environments
• Let multiple entities subscribe to and simultaneously receive each message
• Provide separation of concerns by breaking down monolithic functionality into microservices
• Utilize reliable message queuing capabilities to handle surge scenarios and maintenance windows.

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 Sonos expands their system, they are publishing more and more events to the event mesh so individual development teams can leverage it to meet their users’ needs.

API support and partnerships with Boomi and SAP made Solace a perfect fit, while smart topics and event mesh functionality helps Sonos easily scale their integrations. For instance:

• Faster inventory-to-order flow: 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.
• Cross-border system integration: By taking an event-driven approach with the help of Solace’s real-time data technology, Sonos can integrate systems across countries and suppliers in manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, retailing and more.
• More agile business operations: 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.