Tech & Engineering
6
min of reading
March 5, 2020

Events Hub: how and why an Event Driven Perspective can greatly help your company

Eduardo Arantes
ABM Content & Communication
B2B marketer focused on technology and digital transformation, helping to provide useful information about Digital Strategies and Business opportunities for several industries.
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What is Event Driven for?

An Event Driven Architecture (EDA) uses state changes (events) to trigger asynchronous communications and is common in modern microservice based applications. As events, we can describe specific actions within a context that are important to the business, such as when the customer adds a product to the cart in an e-commerce. We note here that this action is treated as a moment, the detection is done instantly and we do not need a request/response cycle for validation, freeing computer resources for the operation.

According to Gartner, by 2020 (i.e. soon) having a real-time, Event Driven view will be a necessary feature for 80% of digital business solutions, and 80% of new business ecosystems will require event processing support. Thus, solutions aimed at Events, Event Driven Architectures and Async APIs (we cover all of this in this article) are increasingly growing.

Some emerging technologies rely on EDA for maximum performance, such as IoT. In this case, Beacons are a great example of the need to base on events, because imagine managing hundreds of devices in the same store and depending on a request/response cycle for each. The use of resources in this case would be huge, and may even make the use unfeasible. Events supply this demand in this context, making it possible to capture information and trigger other actions.

Business moments and real-time reactions

The definition of Business Moments is quite simple: they are specific events within a journey that may represent some kind of (re)action to take advantage of that moment.

Why are they so important? It’s simple, we can illustrate a more dramatic situation here. Imagine that you are an Insurance Company and that your greatest value is the agility to ensure the health and well-being of your customers. Imagine now that one of your biggest customers has suffered a very serious car accident (let's soften the story and say he hasn't had serious injuries). Waiting for people to react to trigger the emergency services, and only then trigger the insurance company can be a rather lengthy process, right?

Now, imagine that the context of your insurance company is digital, and all events are monitored. Imagine also that this insurance company was able to provide a simple system integrated with the GPS of the client's smartphone, combined with some IoT devices, which can measure some behaviors and identify situations.

At the moment of the accident an event is triggered in the insurance company's system saying that there is an accident. At that same instant we can trigger other cycles of actions to ensure a real-time response, such as a confirmation if it really was an accident, through a push-notification in the app, or even a triggering of emergency systems (firefighters, police, etc.) informing the location, time and conditions of the accident. We don't even need to enter the amount that this delivers to your client, because we reduce hours to seconds in this context.

And in real life, how can we benefit from EDA?

The example of the insurer, although quite feasible, is still directed to a certain niche of insurers, especially in the Brazilian context. Bringing this case to our routines, we can think of some contexts of utilization, and potential real business gains with the use of events and real-time reaction.

Another point to keep in mind is the complexity of the number of systems in any company. The simple act of paying an account can trigger a quite considerable chain of systems and make an immediate response difficult. To clarify a little about that, we have this really cool article about Event Driven Standards.

The Payment Industry is a clear example

When we talk about payments, we're talking about time. That's right, the action of making a monetary transaction has more to do with time than with money specifically. Why is that? Well, the expectation for today is to have everything in real time. Nobody else wants to "wait until the payment confirmation", it has to be fast, otherwise you are not delivering value. Try listening to your customer who has been waiting two or three hours for confirmation of an online purchase on their credit card. Certainly, in that time he's already triggered your company's support (and generated more costs).

Right now, you must be thinking that this can be solved with other technologies. However, let's think about the degree of complexity when we have several other systems that need to capture this information (banks, buyers, marketplaces, ERP etc). Here at this point we can see the feasibility of Events Notifications, and how we can equalize all occurrences through a single call. Basically, in the act of a purchase the event(s) is (are) triggered and only the systems interested in each type of event will be triggered, triggering a GET to receive such information.

Now think that each of these systems can take advantage of these moments to direct more specific actions to your customer, either a quick confirmation of purchase, or offering products and promotions that are directly related to this event, being more accurate and offering a better experience for your customer. In addition, it generates a lower dependency on remarketing actions, which can be costly and invasive for your consumer.  

How Sensedia can help enable an Event Driven Architecture

Sensedia Events Hub helps enable an Event Driven Architecture that enables you to react to Business Moments in real time and with asynchronous communication, bringing greater agility, scalability, resilience and extensibility to the IT Architecture.

This tool makes it possible to create all the necessary flows, configuring the events of business interest, as well as policies and routines with publishers and subscribers. At this point, it is important to pay attention to the possibility of configuring security policies for message triggers, response and reattempts actions, in the event of any type of failure to receive the event. All these routines are facilitated with the same low-code interface as Sensedia's products, making stream creation more intuitive and saving review and quality control efforts as we can establish a standard of parameters to be replicated, and ensure that deploys conform to business requirements.

In conclusion

An Event Driven Architecture will certainly bring great benefits to your company that go beyond enjoying business moments. We can think about reducing resource consumption, streamline responses and optimize experiences for the customer. Clearly, it is not just Insurance or Payments industries that can benefit from it.

There are hundreds of contexts that monitor events becomes an excellent option for real business gains. Imagine the gains for Healthcare industries, or Industries with all their automations. The possibilities are huge.Want to know more about EDA?

We have some content that can help you a lot on this journey.

Event Driven: Speed Up Your Business with Real-Time Answers and an Event-Oriented Guidance

Event Driven Architecture, Events and Async APIs. WTF?

Learning About Event Driven Standards

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