What Are Events? Process, Data, and Application Integrators

I first started developing SAP Workflows 25 years ago: five years prior to Gartner announcing that Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) would be the "next big thing" to follow from Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) – SOA likewise still in its infancy in 2003. What's interesting about this is that workflows themselves are, and always have been, "event-driven." The advancement of any given workflow from one step to the next step always depends upon a particular event (or events) occurring, such as PurchaseOrder.Approved.

As you might already know, SAP has been developing ERP software since 1972, making it by far one of the most experienced software vendors in the world to have built its product offerings around business processes, around Process Integration. What's also interesting to note in this regard is that SAP very recently confirmed the tight link between workflows and Process Integration by regrouping and rebranding their cloud-based "Workflow Management" solution into a new offering: "Process Automation" —  apparently the first time in 25 years that their Workflow solution carries a name other than "Workflow."

SAP also prides itself on its expertise in the field of Data Integration: SAP actually stands for Systems, Applications, and Products in data processing, and we are told that their ERPs "touch 77% of global transaction revenue" – resulting in an enormous need for Data Integrations. SAP's very latest offering in this domain is the poorly named "Data Intelligence Cloud: ... A solid foundation for your data fabric architecture to connect, discover, profile, prepare, and orchestrate all your enterprise data assets."

SAP has more than 50 years of experience in integration, and they want to share their knowledge with their customers. They created a guide called the Integration Solution Advisory Methodology, which is a 150-page template that shows how to integrate different systems. SAP identified five different integration styles: Process Integration, Data Integration, Analytics Integration, User Integration, and IoT/Thing Integration. Each style has a primary trigger, such as an application event, schedule, user event, or thing event. SAP updated this information only nine months ago. The important thing to note is that SAP says all the integration styles they identified can be triggered/driven by events. 

You may have also noticed the strange absence of Application Integration from this list. This is particularly strange given that if you research SAP's latest iPaaS offering on the web today, you are likely to read that it will enable you to: "Integrate Applications, Data, and Processes seamlessly across your enterprise." Part of the reason for SAP's apparently only partial embrace of Application Integration's potential is that they are actually quite far behind in this domain in comparison to the other IT giants. This is hardly surprising given that its flagship product – its ERP – is and always has been a monolith; Application Integration being an almost non-subject in the ancient world of monolithic applications.

SAP is so far behind in the domain of Event-Driven Architecture in particular that it opted to resell two separate Solace products – PubSub+ Event Broker and PubSub+ Platform – as its own. To drive the point even further, SAP has rebadged these two products as "Event Mesh" and "Advanced Event Mesh," yet neither of the products actually corresponds with Solace's own definition of an Event Mesh, suggesting that SAP doesn't have a solid grasp of what an Event Mesh represents. Had SAP instead developed their EDA offerings in-house and consequently matured in their understanding of what good EDA looks like – certainly not like an Event Mesh – they might just have noticed a very interesting point: a point that I concede appears to have been missed by more-or-less everyone up until now.

In the context of EDA, there is absolutely no difference between Process, Data, and Application integration: the "Event" should be the pulse of all well-architected integrations today. While this might not surprise you greatly in the case of Process and Application integration, as I first wrote in December 2020, Events are additionally "the mother of all data" and, as such, should also be used as the basis for all modern, real–time, data integrations.