Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

I previously wrote about the ongoing importance of event brokers and event management in enabling enterprises to adopt event-driven architecture and event stream processing. Many enterprises adopt EDA as the design pattern for maximizing events to deliver real-time business processes. There are many advantages to using EDA, including a cultural shift away from batch processing towards real-time analysis and decision-making.

The technological components required to enable this shift include a network (or mesh) of event brokers and event management software for discovering, cataloging, governing and securing events and event-driven applications. Software providers that have been integral to the adoption of event brokers, such as Solace, are expanding support for event-driven applications and event governance and management.

Solace was founded in 2001 to provide event-broker technology. Over the years, it expanded its portfolio with products that combine event-broker technology with event management to help enterprises adopt event-driven applications and EDA. Numerous customers in a variety of industries—including financial services, automotive, gaming, food and beverage and retail—use Solace. The provider works with customers to facilitate the adoption of event brokers to manage and govern events and event-driven applications.

Software providers such as Solace also assist enterprises in becoming event-driven organizations that recognize event processing as a core business component. Although real-time business is seen as a current phenomenon, the execution of business events has always occurred in real time; it is the processing of data related to these events that has accelerated. Few organizations have cultivated the skills and infrastructure to maximize event-driven data: Less than one-quarter (22%) of participants in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark Research are analyzing data in real time.

The heart of Solace’s PubSub+ Platform is the provider’s PubSub+ Event Broker, which provides the functionality to stream events across cloud, on-premises and edge environments. In addition to publish and subscribe messaging, Solace PubSub+ Event Broker also supports message patterns for request and reply, queuing, streaming and replay. A network of event brokers gets support via the Solace PubSub+ Event Mesh.

Event brokers and event meshes are managed with another key component of the Solace PubSub+ Platform: PubSub+ Event Portal. Users of PubSub+ Event Portal can discover and catalog events generated by PubSub+ Event Broker as well as Apache Kafka brokers and brokers of other Kafka distributions from Confluent and Amazon Web Services. Solace has taken steps in recent years to ensure PubSub+ Event Portal is compatible with Apache Kafka brokers. In September 2023, for example, the provider announced enhancements to its Event Portal for Apache Kafka functionality, including a native discovery agent to automatically identify Kafka topics and their schemas, catalogs of topics, event streams, schemas and pub/sub interfaces, along with life cycle management and version control functionality. More recently, the provider added an integrated Kafka bridge to PubSub+ Event Broker, enabling the mapping of Kafka message metadata into Solace message metadata and vice versa.

The Solace PubSub+ Platform also includes PubSub+ Mission Control for configuring, deploying and managing event brokers and event meshes; PubSub+ Insights for operational monitoring of the health and performance of event-broker services and event-based applications; and PubSub+ Distributed Tracing for event observability and lineage management based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s open-source OpenTelemetry format.

The latest enhancements to the Solace PubSub+ Platform reflect the provider’s move to enhance its event-driven application programming interface management and event-driven integration capabilities as a complement to event monitoring and management. Specifically, the latest update to the PubSub+ Platform included a new API called declarative SEMP (or dSEMP) that enables users to configure PubSub+ Event Broker with Infrastructure as Code via Terraform as well as early access to the ability to configure brokers from within the Event Portal environment.

The February 2024 product update also added PubSub+ Integration Hub as a single environment for discovering and managing connectors to enable event-driven integration. Solace also shared an early look at its approach to enabling event-driven artificial intelligence agents and applications.

The importance and scope of event management is rapidly growing. I assert that by 2026, more than one-half of enterprises will invest in functionality to discover, catalog, monitor and govern events and event flows to generate greater business value from event-driven architecture. Solace is well-placed to support the impending growth thanks to the depth of its expertise in relation to event brokers, event management and EDA as well as its expanding integration with Apache Kafka, event-driven API management and event-driven integration. The latter capabilities are relatively immature, and we look forward to details about Solace’s approach to enabling enterprise artificial intelligence, but I recommend that organizations investing in event-driven applications and EDA include Solace and its PubSub+ portfolio in evaluations.

Regards,

Matt Aslett