Event-Driven IT Is a Priority for CIOs

Some 58% of CEOs said that growth was their top business priority, according to the Gartner 2017 CEO survey. It's up to enterprise CIOs to come up with event-centric digital business strategies and implementations to reach that growth goal.

Event-driven architecture (EDA) enables enterprises to respond in real time to "business moments" by making their software more-event driven. Gartner Inc. defined EDA as a design model whereby a software component executes a function in response to receiving one or more event notifications. To drive the growth of digital business, strategic parts of the application portfolio will need to be event-driven.

Gartner's Anne Tomas, vice president and distinguished analyst, said in a press release that EDA was the "secret sauce" for CEOs to grow their digital businesses, and a key enabler for digital transformations.

"Event processing and analytics play a significant role in allowing organizations to capitalize on a business moment," Thomas said in the release. "A convergence of events generates a business opportunity, and real-time analytics of those events, as well as current data and wider context data, can be used to influence a decision and generate a successful business outcome. But you can't capitalize on the business moment if you don't first recognize the convergence of events and the digital business opportunity."

Gartner believes that EDA will be an essential element for supporting digital transformations, starting next year. This means that application architecture and development teams need to increase their EDA competency this year.

While the report didn't mention how service providers could help enable EDA, there are areas of overlapping interests. Areas where EDA can provide the most immediate value include microservices, AI, the Internet of Things, machine learning and blockchain, according to Gartner. Enterprises can tap into EDA to modernize their application portfolios while mitigating the impact on the legacy application portfolio.

"Modernizing core application systems takes time, and few organizations are in a position to immediately move over to a replacement system," Thomas said. "Instead, they need to use EDA to stage their modernization efforts, and gradually migrate capabilities while implementing digital transformation."

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation