The 5 Critical Requirements for Event-Driven Architecture Success

The world really is event-driven. Big cloud providers and tech analysts agree, including Amazon's CTO, Dr. Werner Vogels, who made the point in his "the world is event-driven" keynote speech at the AWS re:Invent in December 2022. And now groundbreaking new research from IDC shows 90% of the world’s largest companies will use real-time intelligence by 2025, powered by event-streaming technologies.

In the aftermath of recent global and geopolitical events, more and more businesses—from retail and financial services to manufacturing and energy & resources—understand the need to identify and react in real-time to critical issues throughout their product lines, supply chains and geographies. The word is out—EDA is now “crossing the chasm” and going mainstream.

Five steps to EDA success

Many companies are well on their EDA journey, while others are just starting out. Their collective experience is vital to building a roadmap to reap the benefits of event streaming technologies. A recent IDC Infobrief, sponsored by Solace, surveyed over 300 enterprise IT professionals in Asia, North America, and Europe, all working for large companies implementing or considering EDA.

The results are pretty telling—an overwhelming 93% of respondents at companies that have deployed EDA across multiple use cases said EDA has either met or exceeded their expectations. In addition to technical advantages from EDA, most businesses also see clear business benefits: 23% of respondents reported increasing productivity, 22% said better customer acquisition, and 18% saw revenues increase due to their EDA efforts.

This rings true in Singapore as well—65% of respondents in the city-state have reported how the return on investment received from deploying EDA has either met or exceeded their expectations, and business benefits such as increased productivity (17.4%), increased customer acquisition (17.5%), as well as increased revenue (17.4%), were experienced as part of their EDA adoption.

But what’s the secret behind such success? What are the things to do and things to avoid? Survey respondents graciously stepped up here, providing five critical considerations for delivering EDA success based on their experiences adopting and implementing the technology.

Expanding the footprint of EDA across the enterprise is a journey, and every journey starts by assembling those critical to its overall success. Business sponsorship and engaging key stakeholders are vital, especially in the early days of EDA adoption—56% of respondents in the early EDA stages cited this as a priority when ROI and business benefits may not be immediately evident.

Thankfully, as maturity increases and business impact and use cases become more apparent, the need for explicit business support becomes less critical—35% of respondents at an advanced stage of EDA rollout felt C-level support was critical.

The impact of well-aligned C-suite, operational, and technical teams also reflects business-level digital maturity. Unsurprisingly, respondents with higher levels of EDA maturity also have higher levels of overall digital maturity, including the digital strategy and change management support needed to sustain digital business initiatives.

As EDA becomes more pervasive across an organization, the associated demands on IT become more sophisticated, requiring a deepening of EDA skills in the IT organization, notably with developers and architects. 36.1% of respondents cited the lack of skills to execute EDA as a hurdle to adoption. Approaches to logging, governance and oversight (30.7%) can also become increasingly challenging and must be thought through carefully.

This is where EDA providers must step up to the plate to provide adequate training and a certification path for architects and developers looking to gain the fundamental knowledge and skills to design and implement event-driven systems. This should include technical details such as understanding the various design patterns for EDA, microservices choreography vs. orchestration, the saga pattern, and RESTful microservices. Education should also clearly define and demonstrate key concepts and tools for EDA success, such as event portal, topic hierarchy best practices, and event mesh.

It is essential to take the company with you along the entire journey. The research showed the bumps in the roadmap. In the early stages of EDA maturity, lack of understanding of EDA benefits and inconsistent buy-in are the most frequently cited organizational challenges (38%). As organizations progress to a centralized EDA status, cost concerns (42%) and finding the right use cases (36%) can hamper success. More advanced stages of EDA also cite a lack of understanding of EDA benefits (45%) and cost concerns (39%), but change resistance (38%) becomes a significant hurdle.

Continuous focus on change management and communicating business benefits is vital to overcoming these challenges. The core group of invested stakeholders who began the journey must band together to clearly and consistently demonstrate the value of EDA to other areas of the business regularly. 

The right measures of EDA success in the early days of adoption are not the same as those when EDA adoption grows over time.

Fewer EDA-mature organizations cited "cost reduction" (23%) and "number of projects completed" (31%) as top measures of success. In the medium term, after two or three use cases, most organizations used "operational stability" and "number of projects" to measure success. Further, after broad adoption, "increased revenue" (43%), "operational stability" (32%) and "amount of resiliency" (30%) become the more important measures.

This changing set of measures reflects the maturity curve of EDA adoption across multiple applications within a business's ecosystem. A business operates in real-time when deploying EDA across key customer-facing, employee-facing and supplier-facing organizations. This is where revenue is generated in high volumes, organization-wide—hence stability and resilience become vital in ensuring things continue to run smoothly on a global scale across hundreds of sites or product lines.

To accelerate business and technical benefits and reduce the impact of challenges, survey respondents cited “finding a supportive partner to assist with the implementation of EDA” (37.7%) as a critical consideration.

Partnerships and product integrations with preferred business software and SaaS service providers can make it easy to event-enable an organization. Given the amount of new technical skills and learning previously cited, this can provide peace of mind for organizations taking their first steps on the journey to EDA.

For example, Singapore’s largest and fastest-growing carsharing platform, GetGo, recently selected Solace to support its rapid growth and international expansion, tapping on EDA to integrate the growing variety of services like user authentication and payments required to support its growing user base. The new event mesh that GetGo is building with Solace’s PubSub+ Platform will ensure a stable foundation for real-time information distribution—which will be critical as they expand internationally and integrate more user-focused services into its platform.

EDA isn't just a change in IT architecture; it's a mindset that applies to modern business leadership organization-wide. To keep the momentum during the journey, respondents also noted using a robust change management plan that “ensures coordinated middle management support” (35.1%), as they are typically accountable for getting work delivered and reporting across the organization.

Respondents cited that top-down or bottom-up change management sometimes needs to catch up on the tactical needs of middle managers. As a result, management needs to integrate its people and digital systems to join in shared decision-making.

The march to EDA is on

The findings of this InfoBrief demonstrate that event-driven architecture is now the de facto standard way businesses are becoming real-time. By understanding these five critical requirements as they deploy their EDA journey, organizations across a range of industries can unlock the full potential of real-time movement of their critical business data.

Kent Nash, executive vice president for global sales at Solace, wrote this article.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/whyframestudio