If you’ve been following our recent blog series, you know we’ve been diving into the topic of event data and the profitable benefits it can bring your SaaS enterprise when collected, analyzed, and employed strategically.
Events-Based Billing is a game-changing pricing strategy in the SaaS market. This unparalleled value-based pricing can bring success to your bottom line while improving your customer satisfaction. As we discussed in our last post, event data is no doubt the brick foundation that makes the build possible, but event streaming is the construction crew and heavy machinery behind Events-Based Billing and many more data-driven tools.
Turn activity into action. Turn data into dollars.
The term “data is king” is not an unfamiliar phrase. One could argue data’s sovereignty only continues to rise as our world becomes even more automated and digital—meaning streaming your event data is more important than ever for business success.
But what exactly is event streaming?
IBM describes event streaming as a tool that allows businesses to collect and analyze their event data so they can respond to that event in real time. In today’s value-driven market (with customers expecting responsive experiences when they interact with your product), being able to make data-driven, real-time decisions based on events is imperative to your SaaS success.
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How event streaming works.
To gain a picture of how event streaming works, think about event data as gasoline and event streaming as the vehicle. You need gas to be able to drive. But if you don’t have a vehicle to put the gasoline into, a full gas can doesn’t do you much good. The same principle applies to plugging event data into an event streaming platform; if you don’t have the streaming capability, your event data just sits there collecting dust..
Event streaming is the technology behind the scenes that collects, analyzes, prioritizes, and integrates the continuous streams of event data entering your applications daily. This filterable data then empowers you to use those insights to your advantage to make data-driven decisions for your business.
Apache Software sums event streaming up nicely as, “the practice of capturing data in real-time from event sources like databases, sensors, mobile devices, cloud services, and software applications in the form of streams of events.” The captured event data is then stored, manipulated, and processed to unlock the possibility of instantaneous, reactive customer experiences. You can capture rich data around any user, application, or product event and use this data to deliver an ultra-personalized customer experience.
You experience the effects of events streaming every day, even if you’re not aware of it. Every time you’re scrolling through social media and see notifications or new content pop up in real time, while you’re using your GPS app on your car or phone to get to your destination, and when your recurring mortgage payment gets processed on-time, without you pushing a button. You can thank event streaming for all of those things.
Event Streaming vs. Batch Processing
To peel back the layers of event stream processing even further, it’s helpful to understand how data was collected and analyzed before this technology existed. Before companies were able to stream events in real-time, events were collected via batch processing. The difference? Batch processing analyzes pre-collected, static data, while event streaming analyzes continuous events, or “data in motion” as Hazelcast explains it. Both methods are still effective and used in conjunction with each other, with streaming often seen as complementary to the traditional batch method.
Like its name suggests, event streaming quite literally streamlines the data collection and analyzing process. Take a fast food burger joint’s kitchen as a fictitious example. Before streaming events was possible, processing data was akin to a kitchen manager approaching each employee at their respective station (i.e, the pickles, lettuce, meat, bun, cheese, etc.) to individually convey the instructions for how to assemble their piece of a burger. As you can tell, this would be a highly inefficient process for a kitchen, as it is for data management. Fortunately, kitchens like this have a much more efficient process. Instead of individually conveying instructions to each station, they synopsize the entire order on one ticket and simply pass it down the burger assembly line.
This example is a great way to conceptualize the difference between event streaming and traditional data processing. The improved process of data streaming helps companies crunch numbers in real time by gathering data via APIs and analyzing it with programmatic queries to fuel any metrics or tools they need to create.
Capitalize on event streaming to bring value to your SaaS business.
Garnering reliable insights from event data can lead to faster decisions, enhanced customer experiences, and an increased bottom line. Event streaming fuels these events-driven capabilities. By implementing an event streaming solution that harnesses the power of your event data, you can:
Create a customized
usage-based billing model like the pros
By collecting and implementing your event data into your pricing strategy, you can create a multi-dimensional, pay-as-you-go billing model based on real-time metrics that you define. Events-Based Billing is the next generation of billing for SaaS companies and can help maximize your revenue and increase your customer satisfaction with ultimate value-based pricing.
Uncover real-time, custom insights from your business metrics.
Tired of clunky, manual analytics solutions and spreadsheet overload? You need an event streaming platform that serves as a central source of truth for your billing and revenue management data. Look for an event streaming tool that enables you to create custom metrics and dashboards based on your event data, so you can make strategic business decisions about the future of your business.
Discover trends and predict future business patterns. Utilizing predictive models and streamed event data, you can study past trends to positively influence future ones. The more you know about why a customer makes a certain decision and how they interact with your product, the more empowered you are to make data-backed decisions that better engage the customer.
Stream your way to SaaS success.
If you’re ready to stream, store, and analyze your data faster and more efficiently, our team of event data experts is here to help you start streaming (and billing) like the SaaS titans. You can start streaming your events in minutes with a fully managed, in-house streaming and analytics platform (like Stream by Maxio) that offers pre-configured data infrastructure to power event-driven products.
In 2020, Maxio acquired the event-streaming platform Keen to serve as the data infrastructure for cutting-edge, event-driven products. Since this acquisition, Maxio has deeply embedded Keen’s functionality into our platform to help our customers become event-driven. By leaving the analytics infrastructure to us, any developer or company can wield the power of event data without a specialized background in data engineering.
Whether you’re interested in deploying a next-generation Events-Based Billing pricing strategy, or utilizing an advanced analytics tool to garner deeper insights into your customer activities, Maxio can help you use your event data to your benefit.