Open banking will force banks to become more transparent with customers. The change for banks will be multi-dimensional. Internally, the banking tech stack will become more event-driven, and Solace will help power this evolution, says Sumeet Puri, Global Head of Field Technology, Solace in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN).
As a Multifaceted technology leader for the global field of technology at Solace Inc. what are your key responsibilities?
As the Global Head of Field Technology at Solace, I help customers progress through their event-driven, real-time transformation journeys. I head up our sales engineering operations and lead a team of customer-facing architects globally, who are trusted advisors to our customers and partners on becoming event-driven, cloud-native and API-first.
Solace is a provider of leading-edge integration technology. Solace Event Brokers operate as an “Event Mesh” network and serves as the digital nervous systems of an enterprise. This allows applications, devices and legacy systems to be integrated in real-time, bringing about agility, faster time to market, quicker response time and better customer experience.
How are you implementing technologies like Big Data, Mobility, IoT, and Analytics, in your company?
Solace Event Mesh reliably routes events which serve as the core backbone for moving data to and from IoT devices, mobility, enterprise apps, big data, Artifical Intelligence (AI) and machine learning systems.
We are an endpoint for the messaging protocol MQTT in IoT devices and a data river for Big Data/ AI Lakes. Many large enterprises and government agencies around the world, such as SAP, Airtel, Reliance Jio and the US Federal Aviation Agency, rely on Solace to build their analytics, IoT and mobility systems. What new innovations are you planning for the next five years? As applications and ecosystems become event-driven, we have an initiative called the Event Horizon to support this transformation. It enables applications, microservices, functions, and devices to be real-time, event-driven and responsive. There are design time and run time tools created to better manage events, further strengthening our existing Event Mesh capabilities. Solace provides developers with more resources around best practices, reference architectures to kick-start and accelerate their digital transformation journeys.
How challenging is it to move service orient architecture of API from the 2015 model to 2020?
The move from SOA to APIs is transformative, as it is about granularity and reuse. APIs alone is not sufficient. While APIs typically request-reply, businesses are event-driven. For a payment request, many events going on in the back-end, including validation, funding, risk, fraud check, settlement, data-warehouse updates and analytics.
Similarly, for an order management system, a new or an updated order will result in more than one “orchestrated” flow. An event-driven approach to APIs allows event data to be “pushed” to microservices in a guaranteed and parallel manner. New microservices can be introduced to be subscribed to the same events to streamline business without changing the API flow. Data warehouse, logging, AI and analytics, get their data as guaranteed streams with “eventual consistency”, where invoked API results in a faster predictable response time. AsyncAPI is an upcoming standard Solace is supporting. AsyncAPI is an upcoming standard in this space which Solace, along with many other API and enterprise vendors such as SAP, Slack, and Salesforce, are supporting.
What steps are you taking to make open banking responsive and agile?
Internally, the banking tech stack will become more event-driven, and Solace will help power this evolution. Banks are also starting to have event catalogues with well-defined topic taxonomies and the Event Mesh routing them. New applications can just publish or subscribe with these taxonomies in a governed manner. Externally, open banking is fronted with APIs. Solace helps these APIs to be event-driven, also internally and externally with the AsyncAPI standard over standard protocols such as AMQP, MQTT and REST.
