Benefits of Event Streaming at Every Stage of Platform Adoption
Whether your organization needs simple pub/sub messaging, real-time data analytics, or a complete digital transformation, event streaming technology brings a myriad of benefits for the new era of big data.
How much value can your organization expect from adopting an event streaming platform? The answer is, “It depends.” It depends on how far your business progresses along the path from early, small-scale projects to a full-on enterprise-wide event-driven architecture. Those early use cases will almost always provide some value, but they will ultimately pale in comparison to the transformational value realized by organizations that have more fully matured in their use of event streaming.
Recently, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) released a new e-book titled Recognizing the Full Value of Event Streaming: Beyond Messaging to Meaning. In a section on the power of systematic thinking, the e-book touches upon the progression that most organizations make on their event streaming journey, often beginning with a single point-to-point use case, evolving to multiple streams, and from there to a connected ecosystem that spans most, if not all areas, of the business. This concept is reflected in the maturity model that we at Confluent use to describe and convey the added value that organizations realize as they mature in their use of event streaming with Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud.
When an organization is just starting out with event streaming, the initial focus is typically on single solutions. Here, in the first two stages of maturity, simple pub/sub use cases are common as developers learn about event streams and complete early experiments with Apache Kafka. These experiments lead to early pilot projects, for example, data pipelines to address specific production use cases.
As the organization progresses, it begins to reuse data streams across clusters of applications, powering real-time data analytics and other mission-critical use cases. At this point, the perception of event streaming within the organization begins to shift. Instead of thinking in terms of individual projects for which event streaming is a good fit, teams begin to adopt a broader perspective, in which the event streaming platform comes into view.
As the business begins relying on the event streaming platform for the majority of mission-critical use cases across connected lines of business, platform effects begin amplifying the value of event streaming. The organization sees massive reuse of data as efficiencies of scale kick in. Companies that have reached this level of maturity are in position to reap the benefits of an even greater jump in value brought on by the network effect.
