[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In today’s turbulent, high-speed business world, it’s critical that business systems are agile and quickly adaptable to new requirements, regulations and opportunities. Change needs to happen in days, not weeks or months, and should not require an army of IT staff. In this sense, the event-based approach, known as Event-Driven, emerges as a very attractive solution.
Business systems are often a combination of many standalone applications running on-premises and increasingly in the cloud. The links between these applications need to be agile and quickly adaptable to new requirements and opportunities.
Continue reading to find out how an Event-Driven approach can increase the flexibility and intelligence of your organization, besides contributing to the reduction of costs with business changes!
Time-based applications
Today, time-driven and request-driven interactions are two common types of communication between business applications.
Time-driven interactions follow a predetermined schedule that governs when one application requests one service or information from another. A practical example is a daily download from an inventory system to get a catalog of available products.
Time-driven applications work well when they occur infrequently or only exchange small amounts of information, such as a daily parts catalog. As companies demand information closer to real time, the frequency of time-driven interactions increases.
Request-based applications
With request-driven interactions, an application requests a service or information from another system when needed, usually as a result of preprogrammed logic. A practical example is when you add a new customer to your CRM system and automatically make a request for their to be added to the accounting system in the Accounts Receivable group.
For example, instead of a daily supplier parts catalog update, buyers require updated pricing and availability. The time-driven approach ultimately leads to reduced performance and scalability, as communication between systems often happens when not needed, resulting in unnecessary interactions.
Request-driven applications provide a better scenario than time-driven applications. They request a service or information from other systems as a result of their internal logic. That is, each interaction meets a specific need in the application.
However, the resulting system is not as flexible and efficient as it could be, and adapting to new requirements and opportunities requires internal modifications to applications. This type of change is typically expensive and takes weeks or months to complete.
Event-Driven Applications
Before addressing the concept of Event-Driven, it is necessary to understand what an event is:
What is an event?
In a business systems context, the term “event” means that a categorized and well-defined business condition has occurred. In this context, an event provides only enough information so that recipients can respond to the specific event type and occurrence as desired.
These events are business focused and can be very diverse. Thus, an event could be the addition of a new customer, the dismissal of an employee, the issuance of a check, a sale, the expenses of a project that exceeded the budget by 10%, and so on.
How do Event-Driven applications Work?
Event-Driven interactions are leading to the development of new business applications and solutions, enabling companies to quickly adapt to change. The event-oriented approach is by no means new. But now it’s receiving deserved attention in the field of business applications, where reducing the cost of innovation is critical.
Using this approach, applications can monitor specific business events and, in response, choose to ignore them, take immediate action, delay a response to improve efficiency, or combine information with those received from other events for an integrated view of the business.
A consumer application, that is, one that receives notification of an event, can create new business events that are further processed by other consumer applications.
The application that generates the event doesn’t need to know your consumers or how your events are consumed. This results in a loosely coupled, highly scalable and flexible application architecture with low cost of change.
In an Event Driven environment, there are no fixed provider and consumer relationships, as there are in other interaction models. Instead, a business application communicates to the system that a specific business event has occurred, and applications that are attending this type of event become consumers.
Consumers receive only enough information to identify the event and are free to handle it the way they want. Other approaches result in large and complicated data sets transmitted to all consumers, regardless of whether they require the complete data set, negatively affecting scalability and increasing cost in the event of change.
Another advantage of this approach is that it makes the business highly customizable, as you can schedule unique responses for a particular type of event. This can help you dramatically improve the customer experience on online platforms.
In addition to Event-Driven, Digital Twin is another important tool used to ensure user experience improvements. Click here to find out how![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][ultimate_icons][/ultimate_icons][/vc_column][/vc_row]
