Floyd Davis is the VP of solution engineering for APJ and the Middle East at Solace. In this article, he discusses how Solace is unlocking the power of digital banking with its platform and technology with EDA (Enterprise Driven Architecture).
EDA is not a thing. It’s a terminology. It’s an idea. But it’s fundamental to the way enterprises are building their IT landscapes, the way they are developing their applications, and the way they are building their businesses from a technology perspective. Given the challenges that all businesses have faced during COVID, no single vertical or business did not get disrupted during the past three-plus years. So, enterprises and businesses need to adapt. They have been disrupted and need to change, and EDA is a fundamental piece of that transformation.
EDA takes the concept of an event and makes it the single most important unit of the whole ecosystem. In retail, when a consumer buys a certain product, it is an event. When a passenger boards a flight late, in the airline industry, it is an event. Applications need to know about these events. Once they know about the event, they must act on it. When a customer buys a certain product, the inventory, merchandise management, and customer loyalty systems need to know about that event. The inventory system will note that one of these items has been purchased, and we need to update our inventory. In merchandise management, we need to go and replenish the item that has been purchased. In customer loyalty, we need to update their points or rewards. All these events and items are real-time. They are hybrid or multi-cloud across a diverse set of technologies. So, the infrastructure that runs this needs to be enterprise-grade. EDA is about taking such events and making them available to the right applications in real time.
At the core of an event-driven architecture is something called an event broker. The event broker is responsible for delivering those events with scale performance, high agility, and fault tolerance.
The event broker then becomes an event mesh where event brokers are bought together. With dynamic routing, you can then distribute these events in real-time to the places that need to achieve it. The event mesh underpins the concept of EDA.
Let us look at some examples of where EDA has been adopted and where different enterprises have used the event mesh concept to take advantage of moving to a more real-time connected business.
Standard Chartered Bank is one of the large full-service banks across 150 markets worldwide. They are very heavily involved in the Asian and African markets. Their challenge was moving from point-to-point MQ-style infrastructure architecture to make them the ability to jump into the cloud. Part of this move was to take the event brokers and allow them to move from on-prem MQ-style architecture to have a hybrid cloud event mesh that allows them to move their bank into the digital age by leveraging the event mesh concept and the EDA concepts underneath.
NETS is one of the leading payment services in Singapore. It serves merchants, consumers, and banks and processes around 1 trillion Singapore dollars in yearly transaction values. They had the challenge of legacy infrastructure and applications, and they needed to be able to adopt new and different ways of paying. So, for example, when they had to roll out their QR code payments, they needed an agile, real-time infrastructure that they could seamlessly put on top of the new style of payments to be able to interface with their own with their existing legacy systems. By implementing event-mesh and EDA, they were able to roll out the QR code payment system seamlessly and adopt other types of payment systems.
Heineken is a large Brewer. They’re present in more than 70 different countries. They have over 300 International, regional, and local specialty beers and ciders. They employ approximately 80,000 people. Their challenge was their iPads, and Cloud Messaging Service was overwhelmed with large and unpredictable volumes of orders. This resulted in lost and duplicate orders. So, they implemented the event mesh under the covers and were able to offer real-time order management.
A consumer product goods company had a large number of logistics and shipping happening over and above manufacturing their products. They looked at enabling a single event and making that available to dashboards, applications, and engines to make the routing of their shipping lanes smarter. They were able to build a virtual ocean control tower. They use a network of connected event brokers that allows them to track all the shipping seamlessly and make decisions that will allow them to efficiently and effectively reroute around issues like congestions, blockages, etc., in real-time. This has allowed them to save over $10 million annually in shipping charges.
To conclude, if your business becomes real-time through the event mesh, leveraging event-driven architecture allows you to make decisions about anything going on in your environment in real-time and make decisions that you can use to affect and impact your business positively.
