Seven steps to reach your business goals with AxonIQ

Follow these seven easy steps to achieve your business goals utilizing the AxonIQ Business Value Calculator.

Introduction

When companies consider investments in new technology, deciding on the technological and architectural aspects of the solution is already difficult. A project's most important element is to balance the business value of new technologies properly. This is a big challenge and often not even a part of the considerations. 

Based on many conversations with customers and prospects, AxonIQ developed the Business Value Calculator (BVC) to help overcome this hurdle.  The BVC is a tool to highlight the technical and financial benefits of using our software platform compared to other more complex and expensive options.

The BVC is based on the value of the technological benefits of the Axon Software Stack (Axon Framework and Axon Server) and is used in conversations between an AxonIQ business consultant and a company, typically represented by heads of application development, software architecture, and digitalization managers.

Seven steps toward your business value

In seven steps, we will show you the value of our technology based on your parameters, such as headcount (FTEs), cost per FTE, and the costs of existing tools/infrastructure: 

1. The value of an open-source framework
2. The value of efficient message routing
3. The value of an optimized event store
4. The value of observability
5. The value of high availability
6. The value of scalability
7. The value of replacing existing tools and platforms (savings)

Step 1: The value of an open-source framework

First, we will show you the financial benefit of using our open-source, purpose-built framework instead of building your own framework to build applications based on DDD, CQRS, and event-sourcing patterns.

Building a dependable, event-driven architecture is a challenging feat. There is an entire array of engineering challenges you will have to face and decisions you will have to make. Without the right tools, you will spend around 50% of the projected budget on technical challenges. Experience shows you will need between five to eight man-years to develop a Do-It-Yourself framework, costing you between €500K - €1M and even more per man year for maintenance on a yearly basis.

Step 2: The value of efficient message routing

With the usage of Axon Server, you will eliminate the need to write a large amount of integration code. About 90% of the integration code is saved. Less time spent on integration code means money saved on resources writing code. Therefore this feature will significantly reduce many of the risks associated with implementing a microservices project. Also, concurrency errors are minimized by the way Axon Server routes the messages.

Step 3: The value of an optimized event store

Having extremely scalable storage of event data eliminates scalability issues associated with regular SQL (or NoSQL) architectures. AxonIQ customers have documented some of the performance improvements achieved with Axon Server (10-50 times faster response rate is possible). We also have evidence of customers showing time and cost savings managing Axon Server vs. managing open source/RDBMS event stores., even when it is added as a new component to the landscape.

Step 4: The value of observability

Observability refers to the ability to gain insight into how an application or system is behaving without having to rely on assumptions or guesswork.

Debugging and tuning

Axon Server event sourcing can help achieve fast debugging by providing developers with a comprehensive and detailed history of all events that have occurred in the system. This history can be used to "replay" past events and enables developers to recreate the exact sequence of events that led to an issue or bug and determine the best way to fix it. Up to 80% of debugging time is saved. 

This principle can also be applied to tuning and testing applications (or parts).

Reporting and auditing

Axon Server provides the most reliable form of auditing and reporting out of the box. The combination of Raft, CQRS, and Axon Server event sourcing offers businesses the most reliable and efficient form of auditing and reporting. This combination can reduce the effort required for auditing and reporting by up to 90%, saving valuable time and resources.

Support

Direct access to our engineers will save considerable time debugging or guessing what the problem is.

Step 5: The value of high availability

Over 60% of outages cost more than $100,000, and 15% of outages cost more than $1 million (source: Uptime Institute). The direct losses are substantial but imply a serious risk of losing customer trust. Any unplanned application downtime is detrimental to business success regardless of the particular application's role within the business.

High availability/disaster recovery

• Automated backups are built into Axon Server. A good backup is an input for robust disaster recovery. Do you want disaster recovery with RPO=0 (no data loss)? Across availability zones? Across regions? Across cloud providers? 
• Many SQL databases cannot support high availability and disaster recovery, or they are complex or offer it at a very high cost.
• Axon Server is designed for high availability and disaster recovery from the start.

Step 6: The value of scalability

If a company does not have a scalable event store, it may face several risks that can impact the reliability and performance of its systems:

• Reduced system performance
• Inability to scale the business
• Increased costs

A lack of a scalable event store can lead to various issues that can negatively impact a company's performance, reliability, and growth. It is essential for companies to carefully consider their event store needs and ensure that they have a scalable and reliable solution in place to support their business operations.

Several AxonIQ customers and partners have performed tests comparing Axon Server with other platforms, such as SQL and NoSQL database alternatives. Check out these tests that show that a purpose-built messaging and event store platform makes sense.

Step 7: The value of replacing existing tools and platforms (savings)

Lastly, we calculate your costs (or savings) for replacing a scattered infrastructure/architecture. Imagine the impact of consolidating these into a few:

• Development tools
• Databases
• Message routing/event streaming toolset
• License/support cost (annual)
• Hosting/managed service costs private/public cloud

Our approach

We will set up an online session using the BVC (spreadsheet) to guide you through these seven steps and calculate the bottom-line savings based on your data, and we will generate a report based on your data.

The result

As an example of what you can expect, see one of the overviews that the BVC will automatically generate.

Is it something you would like to explore?

Contact us to schedule a conversation with our technical solution architects and business consultants about the benefits of Axon Framework and Axon Server. All calculations and comparisons are based on your own input/data/parameters.