Self-built edge messaging harms delivery of digital projects

Edge messaging infrastructure is critical to the data delivery that powers the experiences consumers expect, such as live chat, order delivery tracking, and document collaboration.

But a new report from edge messaging platform Ably reveals that 65 percent of organizations experienced an outage or significant downtime in the last 12-18 months with the edge messaging infrastructure they had built in-house.

Among other findings are that 90 percent of organizations think challenges with edge messaging infrastructure built in-house will slow down the delivery of future digital projects. Ensuring continuity of service (46 percent) and delivering the same quality of services to larger volumes of users (43 percent) are identified as the biggest concerns.

"Delivering shared live and collaborative experiences separates the business winners from the rest, yet the engineering complexity required to manually stitch together disparate systems remains a significant hurdle," says Matthew O'Riordan, co-founder and CEO of Ably. "Organizations need to find ways to simplify and speed up the delivery of realtime connections with their existing stacks to keep up with customer demand, otherwise they'll drag down digital transformation at the precise time it needs to accelerate."

While 89 percent of the organizations surveyed believe a scalable and reliable realtime edge messaging infrastructure will give them a competitive advantage in the future, many have found building such infrastructure to be a much larger undertaking than they originally envisaged.

Half say the amount of engineering time required to complete their first edge messaging infrastructure project was more than expected. On average taking 3.5 months longer than they planned. 52 percent say it took more engineering resources than expected to complete their first edge messaging infrastructure project.

When asked what's most important in delivering edge infrastructure, reliability (50 percent), high availability of service (50 percent), and integrity of data (44 percent) are the most commonly cited. Many see the benefits of switching to a realtime platform-as-a-service (or managed service provider), with 60 percent saying switching would improve the existing realtime user experience with a more stable and dependable infrastructure. 56 percent say it would reduce the risk of delivering new user experiences that require edge messaging capabilities, and 55 percent say it would enable them to redeploy engineering bandwidth away from infrastructure and into core product work.

You can get the full State of Edge Messaging report on the Ably site.

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