Maximize your event-driven architecture investment: Harness the power of Apache Kafka with IBM Event Automation

In today’s rapidly evolving digital environment, businesses face complexity caused by information overload. This leaves them struggling to extract meaningful insights from the vast digital footprints they leave behind.

Recognizing the need to leverage real-time data, companies are increasingly choosing event-driven architecture (EDA) as a strategic approach to stay ahead.

Businesses and executives are realizing how they need to stay ahead by deriving actionable insights from the massive amounts of data their digital operations generate every minute. According to IDC, as of 2022, 36% of IT leaders identify the use of technology to achieve real-time decision-making as critical to business success, and 45% of IT leaders say there is an overall lack of skilled personnel for real-time use. Reported. example.^*

This trend will only grow stronger as organizations realize the benefits that come from the power of real-time data streaming. However, you need to find the right technology that fits your organization’s needs.

At the forefront of this event-driven revolution is Apache Kafka, the widely recognized and dominant open source technology for event streaming. It provides businesses with the ability to capture and process real-time information from a variety of sources, including databases, software applications, and cloud services.

Most enterprises already recognize how Apache Kafka provides a strong foundation for EDA, but they often lag behind in unleashing its true potential. This is due to the lack of advanced event processing and event endpoint management features.

Socialization and management of EDA

Apache Kafka allows enterprises to build resilient and scalable applications that ensure rapid delivery of business events, but they must also manage and socialize these events effectively.

To be productive, teams within your organization need access to events. But how can you help ensure the right teams have access to the right events? To address these needs, event endpoint management capabilities are paramount. Share events through a searchable, self-service catalog while maintaining appropriate governance and control with access based on applied policies.

The importance is clear. You can secure business events with custom policy-based controls while allowing your teams to work on events securely with credentials created for role-based access. Do you remember playing in the sandbox as a child? Now your team can learn how to build sandcastles in a box by safely sharing events with specific guardrails to ensure they don’t exceed specified boundaries.

This allows your business to maintain control over events while promoting event sharing and reuse, giving your teams reliable access to the real-time data they need to enhance their daily work.

Additionally, giving your team reliable access to a catalog of related events allows them to reuse events to get more benefit from their individual streams. This allows businesses and teams to avoid duplication and siloing of highly valuable data. Teams can innovate faster because they can easily find reusable streams without being encumbered by the need to source new streams for every task. This allows you to not only access your data, but use it efficiently across multiple streams to maximize its potential positive impact on your business.

Level Up: Build Innovative Business Strategies

Significant technology investments demand real returns in the form of improved business operations, and enabling your teams to access and use events is a critical aspect of this transformation journey.

However, Apache Kafka alone is not always enough. You can receive tons of raw events, but you need Apache Flink to make them relevant to your business. Apache Kafka’s event streaming capabilities and Apache Flink’s event processing capabilities together allow organizations to seamlessly gain valuable real-time insights from their data.

Many platforms that use Apache Flink are often complex and have steep learning curves, requiring deep skills and extensive knowledge of this powerful real-time processing platform. This limits access to live events to a select few, increasing costs for businesses supporting highly technical teams. Instead of being overwhelmed by the complexities of Apache Flink setup, enterprises should maximize their investment by enabling a wide range of users to work with real-time events.

Low-code event processing capabilities should eliminate this steep learning curve by simplifying these processes and enabling users in a variety of roles to work with real-time events. Instead of requiring skilled Flink Structured Query Language (SQL) programmers, other business teams can immediately extract actionable insights from relevant events.

By removing the complexity of Apache Flink, business teams can focus on driving innovative strategies with new access to real-time data. Instant insights now fuel your projects so you can experiment and iterate quickly, accelerating time to value. Keeping your teams properly informed and giving them the tools to react quickly as events unfold can provide a strategic advantage for your business.

Find the right strategic solution

The presence of EDA solutions is increasing as the need to deploy EDA is still recognized as a strategic business imperative. Platforms in the market have recognized the value of Apache Kafka to build resilient, scalable solutions for long-term use.

In particular, IBM Event Automation stands out as a comprehensive solution that is fully integrated with Apache Kafka, providing an intuitive platform for event processing and event endpoint management. By simplifying complex, technology-intensive processes, IBM Event Automation makes Kafka setup more accessible. This allows enterprises to harness the true power of Apache Kafka and create transformational value across their organizations.

An open, community-based approach supported by multiple vendors reduces concerns about future migration needs as individual vendors make different strategic choices. For example, Confluent adopts Apache Flink instead of KSQL. Composability plays an important role here too. In a world saturated with diverse technology solutions, businesses need the flexibility to find and integrate solutions that seamlessly enhance existing investments.

As enterprises continue to navigate an ever-evolving digital landscape, the integration of Apache Kafka and IBM Event Automation has become a strategic imperative. This integration is critical for companies looking to stay at the forefront of technological innovation.

Get started with IBM Event Automation

Register for this webinar to learn more about the innovations powered by IBM Event Automation on Apache Kafka through event processing and event endpoint management capabilities. Take the extra step for your business and request a custom demo to see IBM Event Automation in action. Building the right EDA is not just a strategic advantage. This is essential in today’s dynamic environment.

Register for the webinar now

Source: IDC: Impact of Economic Uncertainty on Real-Time Streaming Data and Analytics, Document No. US49928822, December 2022