We are proud to announce that Lightstreamer has been named a Representative Vendor in the Gartner Market Guide for Event Brokers, published on October 14, 2024. (Accessible to Gartner subscribers only)
As per the research, “Gartner defines an event broker as a technology that enables the publish-subscribe communication pattern between event producers and event consumers.” The report also notes that “Gartner estimates the event broker and messaging infrastructure market was worth $3.2 billion dollars in 2023, with an annual growth rate of 13.6%. This growth has increased compared to previous years, largely driven by renewed interest in event streaming and growing adoption of Apache-Kafka-based technologies.“
Lightstreamer is an event broker specialized in extending event-driven architecture to the internet, particularly for last-mile delivery—the critical network segment extending beyond enterprise boundaries (LAN or WAN) to reach end users. For example, while Kafka is powerful, it was not designed for direct internet access or last-mile integration, which are essential for delivering real-time data to mobile, web, and desktop applications. Acting as an intelligent proxy, Lightstreamer complements other event brokers, particularly for edge use cases, by excelling in data streaming over unreliable networks at scale—a scenario where many event brokers struggle.
According to one of the recommendations stated by Gartner: “Select an optimal set of broker technologies by assessing the use cases your organization needs to support. Pushing a technology beyond its core use case introduces technical debt and limits architectural optimization.“
Streaming real-time data over the public internet presents unique challenges. Lightstreamer’s Intelligent Streaming dynamically adjusts data flow to each user’s network conditions. In scenarios where receiving updates in real time is more critical than receiving every single update—such as online trading or live telemetry—Lightstreamer can resample and conflate data on the fly, ensuring all users remain in sync regardless of connection quality. This avoids delays caused by buffering and effectively handles packet loss, keeping users seamlessly connected.
Lightstreamer also ensures seamless operation across firewalls and proxies by leveraging web-friendly transports such as WebSockets and HTTP, while supporting massive numbers of concurrent connections without compromising quality of service.
With over 500 customers and more than 100 million end-users globally, Lightstreamer powers essential use cases like NASA’s real-time telemetry for the ISS, Sony’s multiscreen engagement for live TV events, and Morgan Stanley’s market data distribution.
Lightstreamer integrates effortlessly with other event-driven systems, offering out-of-the-box connectors for Kafka, MQTT, and IBM MQ. As a member of the Connect with Confluent technology partner program, Lightstreamer enhances its integration capabilities with Confluent products, while also providing rich SDKs to enable custom integrations with backend systems and to deliver real-time capabilities across all types of frontend applications.
Gartner, Market Guide for Event Brokers, Keith Guttridge, Max van den Berk, Andrew Humphreys, Nicholas Carter, Shrey Pasricha, 14 October 2024. (Report accessible to Gartner subscribers only)
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Alessandro Carioni
Lightstreamer
Alessandro Alinone
