Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Messaging and Event Processing: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.

The starting point for a real-time data strategy is the ability to capture and communicate information related to business events as they occur. As applications and devices record events, enterprises must capture the relevant information and ensure it is conveyed to any dependent applications, devices or systems to trigger required actions.

ISG Research defines messaging and event processing as the capturing of events and the sharing of information between applications, devices and systems about events as they occur. Messaging and event processing are the essential foundations of an event-driven architecture and enablers of streaming data processing and streaming analytics.

Messaging has been an important enabler of communication between computer systems for decades. It relied on proprietary protocols that enabled communication within and between homogenous systems. The development and proliferation of open standards more than a decade ago allowed communication within and between heterogeneous systems.

The terms “message” and “event“ are often used interchangeably. While the two concepts are closely related, they do have distinct definitions. An event is a thing that happens—such as a sensor identifying a new temperature reading, a person making a purchase or a supplier updating inventory. Messaging is the sharing of information between applications, devices and systems about events.

Messages contain the data generated by the event plus metadata related to the application that generated it, the classification of the message (known as a topic) and how and where the message will be routed. Individual messages can be published sequentially as message queues, while a continuous flow of event messages is a stream (or event stream).

Key capabilities of messaging include the definition of message topics, as well as publish and subscribe messaging. This ensures the device, system or application receiving the message (the subscriber, consumer or event sink) is updated constantly with the latest messages generated by the source device, system or application (the publisher, producer or event source). Messages from a single producer can be received by a single consumer (point-to-point messaging) or multiple consumers (in groups). Request-reply messaging enables bi-directional communication between producers and consumers.

A critical enabler of messaging is the event broker, a message-oriented middleware responsible for handling and routing messages. Event brokers facilitate communication between applications, cloud services and devices in a distributed architecture without requiring messaging producers and consumers to be tightly coupled by direct integration. The importance of event brokers can be overlooked as mere plumbing. However, they are the fundamental enablers of event-driven architecture—the software design pattern organizations use to take advantage of events and deliver real-time business processes. There are many benefits to using EDA, including a cultural shift away from batch processing towards real-time analysis and decision-making.

EDA encompasses publish and subscribe processing of individual events, complex event processing (which involves aggregation of multiple events) and data streaming. We assert that by 2027, more than one-half of enterprises will invest in functionality to discover, catalog, monitor and govern events and event flows to generate greater business value from event-driven architecture.

EDA is enabled by a network of event brokers (sometimes known as an event mesh) and event management software for discovering, cataloging, governing, securing and monitoring events and event-driven applications, including schema and data quality management. Key capabilities associated with event management include event routing, event filtering, event prioritization and access control.

Success with messaging and events relies on the configuration of event brokers to ensure adequate scalability to meet performance, high availability and disaster recovery requirements. The proliferation of cloud computing—combined with ongoing reliance on on-premises infrastructure—makes it essential that EDA spans multiple cloud providers and hybrid architectures.

Additionally, the low-latency performance characteristics of real-time workloads often make them better suited to data processing where data is generated rather than in a centralized on-premises or public cloud environment. Edge computing refers to a combination of connected Internet of Things devices along with local servers, networking equipment and regional data centers.

IoT data processing typically includes real-time monitoring and processing of key metric data to identify and provide alerts on anomalies, as well as filtering, transformation and batch or stream transfer of data to on-premises or cloud data centers for long-term storage, processing and analysis. Messaging is a critical component of edge computing workloads that enable the orchestration of data processed in multiple locations to deliver low-latency response times and minimize the unnecessary movement of data to on-premises or cloud data centers.

In addition to communicating messages across different computing environments, integration between different event broker technologies also delivers compatibility between applications, devices and systems. This avoids risks associated with vendor lock-in.

Capabilities for event and message monitoring are also essential, including status and performance monitoring, visualization and alerts. Although monitoring of event-based messages naturally needs real-time updates as messages flow across the enterprise, event management software also needs to facilitate the analysis of historical event logs to track performance over time and identify anomalies as they occur. Support for distributed event tracing is also a growing requirement for observing messages as they flow through a distributed architecture, providing integration between event management software and architecture observability products.

In addition to the operational aspects of managing the delivery and orchestration of message queues and streams, event management also provides the basis for extracting meaningful and actionable information from streams of event messages through stream processing and streaming analytics.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Messaging and Event Processing evaluates products based on core capabilities such as messaging, event management and event monitoring. To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include functionality for messaging, event management and event monitoring. Our assessment also considered whether the functionality in question was available from a software provider in a single offering or as a suite of products or cloud services.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of messaging and event processing as we define it: Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Broadcom, Cloud Software Group, Cloudera, Confluent, Google Cloud, Huawei Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Redpanda, Solace and Tencent Cloud.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of messaging and event processing software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating messaging and event processing offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for Messaging and Event Processing in 2025 finds Google Cloud first on the list, followed by AWS and Solace.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Google Cloud.
• AWS.
• Solace.

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• Oracle.
• Solace.
• AWS.

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• Oracle, which has achieved this rating in six of the seven categories.
• Microsoft in five categories.
• Google Cloud in three categories.
• AWS and Solace in two categories.
• Confluent, Redpanda and Tencent Cloud in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle messaging and event processing, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our messaging and event processing blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.