Recently, Gartner released an updated version of its basic research report, the Event-driven Architecture (EDA) Maturity Model. We believe this is a must-read for any manager in the real-time sensitive digital business area.

This report describes the business advantages offered by modern EDA that go beyond those provided by using the Interconnected ABI, and enables enterprises to properly assess where their organization’s current EDA fits into Gartner’s maturity model.

Certainly, VoltDB’s team could not agree more with Gartner’s report: In fact, we encourage the app’s managers to strategically evaluate their event-driven architecture in three key areas to further extend Gartner’s basic model:

Move from event awareness to event driven action

As we understand it, Gartner accurately refers to the “initial occurrence of EDA” as the initial stage of EDA maturity, where some of the lower-order goals of EDA’s advantages are realized, such as change data capture (CDC), which is a non-invasive way to add some business situational awareness between applications. That’s certainly a good start.

As the business units of enterprises and organizations begin to favor “event-driven thinking,” they will begin to actively invest in the agent use of EDA (Phase 2 of Gartner’s mature model), followed by broader and more focused use of event broker technology (Phase 3).

Here’s where things get interesting. Now that events are being generated and consumed, the broker mediates the messaging architecture and provides new value beyond just the pipe broker. However, it must be noted at this point that this broker event data exchange is just the beginning of a well-thought-out event-driven architecture (EDA).

Simply moving or enriching data — that is, using data only to help organizations make informed, time-sensitive decisions and enriching data — is not enough. Now you must go beyond awareness of events to making decisions and taking actions based on those events.

02 Adopt EDA strategy of “low delay first”

This brings us to the next critical EDA feature: how quickly you can act on these events. Given today’s explosive data speeds, and the communications likely to be driven by 5G and machine types, intelligence-based operations must be very fast and latency rates predictable. Therefore, the “low delay First” strategy is critical to achieving continuous improvement of EDA and true business agility.

For example, low latency decisions and alerts/signals are important for effective microservice interactions and choreography. The key metric of agility focused here is the time from “event awareness (agency)” to “decision making based on that event.”

Gain competitive advantage through real-time analytics at true scale and speed

As we understand it, Level 4 of Gartner’s Maturity model is the first real step toward EDA in an organization, bringing together machine learning and decision intelligence. In VoltDB, we call this adaptive decision intelligence, where decisions are based not on static rule sets, but on an evolving set of rules based on iterations of machine learning.

At this level, VoltDB’s unique features will give your organization a lasting competitive advantage. A truly mature organisation needs VoltDB’s real-time analysis (with the latest data, at a large scale and with predictable low latency) to enable the smartest, most timely decisions and the best user experience.

In addition, Gartner notes that the following two key attributes of advanced EDA stand out:

  • Instead of primarily storing their findings or signal alerts in dashboards, flow analysis applications distribute complex events to multiple applications for appropriate action or further analysis in near real-time.
  • With a combination of EDA, API, AI (artificial intelligence), CEP (Complex Event Processing) and Internet of Things (iot) capabilities, near-real-time context awareness enables a compassionate user experience and well-prepared decisions.

VoltDB delivers these key features to customers by combining stream processing and data storage to drive cognitive decisions for intelligent action and ensuring they are tightly integrated. The entire function stack must be consolidated into a single unit and kept as close to the event source as possible (consider local edge or network edge computing to meet these requirements).

Gartner’s Mature Model report on event-driven Architecture provides valuable mature models and concrete recommendations. We recommend that organizations take Gartner’s recommendations seriously and go further than Gartner’s model by actively pursuing EDA that is truly strategic and delivering real-time operations at 5G speeds to drive intelligent decisions.

(Contributions and disclaimers: Gartner, Mature Models of Event-driven Architecture, Efim Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Keith Gutridge, W. Roy Schulte, updated November 30, 2020)

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About VoltDB VoltDB supports strong ACID and real-time intelligent decision making apps to enable connected worlds. No other database product like VoltDB can fuel an app that demands a combination of low latency, massive scale, high concurrency and accuracy at the same time. Founded by 2014 Turing Prize winner Dr Mike Stonebraker, VoltDB has redesigned relational databases to address today’s growing real-time manipulation and machine learning challenges. Dr. Stonebraker has been researching database technology for more than 40 years and has brought many innovations in fast data, streaming data and in-memory databases. During VoltDB’s development, he realized the full potential of using in-memory transaction database technology to mine streaming data, not only to meet the latency and concurrency requirements of processing data, but also to provide real-time analysis and decision-making. VoltDB is a trusted name in the industry and has worked with leading organisations such as Nokia, Financial Times, Mitsubishi Electric, HPE, Barclays and Huawei.