Illustration of an event driven platform in Perforce.
March 21, 2022

Create Event-Driven Architecture for Your Team

IP Lifecycle Management

There are several challenges when working in a large semiconductor enterprise. Design teams may use a non-standard metaview when cataloging IP. IP assets could be shared with people who should not have access. Designers could reuse the wrong IP/version (or not reuse it at all and end up "reinventing the wheel"). Without a platform to bring all this information together, and notify people of changes, teams have limited visibility into how IP is managed and how it should be.

Perforce provides an enterprise-ready, event-driven architecture that helps organizations automate their design process, unite teams, and provide visibility across the IP lifecycle. Individuals and team members can subscribe to these events to be notified when something changes in their organization. You can even use this platform to standardize workflows and visualize your design environment. Learn more.

Learn about using tools to secure and optimize processes at scale with Perforce's enterprise automation 101 >> 

Back to top

What Is an Event-Driven Architecture?

An event-driven architecture, or platform, uses events in a system to trigger and communicate other services and communication.

In Helix IPLM, a message is emitted by the IPLM server when a material event occurs. That message can be processed by customer listening scripts and consumed by any subscribed users in the system. These listening scripts are used to associate an event with a desired action. Many kinds of events are supported, including:

  • Permissions changing on an IP.
  • A new IP has been onboarded to the system.
  • New versions of an IP have reached the prescribed quality level and are ready for testing.
  • New users have been added to the system.
Back to top

How Perforce Creates an Event Pub/Sub Platform

With Helix IPLM (formerly Methodics IPLM), there are over 200 unique types of events that publish in real time. Team members can subscribe to these events to get immediately notified when something changes. The event pub/sub relationship means that after an event is received, it is not replayed, and only current subscribers will see the event.

Because Helix IPLM scales to handle the largest enterprises and the most complex products, teams know that when they subscribe to an event, nothing will slip through the cracks.

Events can be tied to specific libraries, IPs, or other objects of interest. The action that the event triggers can be a simple email or slack integration. It can even kick off a more sophisticated workflow integration, instituting best practices across an organization, or integrate with other data platforms.

Learn How to Embrace IP-Centric Design to Collaborate Seamlessly

Understanding and responding to event triggers can help you move from project-centric design to IP-centric design, a collaboration process that makes IP reuse easier. Read our white paper, Conquer Challenges with IP-Centric Design, for a comprehensive guide to IP-centric and event-driven planning. 

DOWNLOAD WHITE PAPER

Back to top

Helix IPLM: What Is Event-Driven Architecture (With Examples)

Let’s review how this can work for a team.

Email Event Subscription Examples

Let’s say you have several teams all working on various IPs. You want to make sure that if something changes, for example a new version is created, that other teams are notified, and it runs through your standard testing process.

Because you have Helix IPLM, as soon as a new IP version is created, you receive an email alert. This also immediately runs a designated test. Now, you can go into the IPLM system and review what changed.

Perhaps that IP was modified by someone without the necessary permissions, signaling a potential security issue. You can immediately investigate to resolve the issue quickly. Having visibility into what is happening in your organization saves you time down the line by enabling you to resolve issues as they occur.

Splunk Event Subscription Examples

Splunk is another use case to integrate with Helix IPLM. It can handle the log files associated with events and display the information in a user-friendly dashboard. For example, you could implement a Splunk alert when permissions change. This helps you make sense of the change and protect your IPs. This can be critical for large enterprises that are managing potentially millions of transactions across thousands of IPs.

📕 Related Resource: Learn more about How to Use Bolt Tasks for Better Splunk Compliance Reporting

Back to top

Get Started With an Event Driven Architecture by Perforce

Helix IPLM by Perforce offers semiconductor organizations the ability to monitor robust information in a high-quality, scalable events system. It can deal with the millions of event triggers in the system and scale to supports your enterprise, no matter the size.

With Perforce, your enterprise can ensure that releases are high-quality, IP is integrated into the right products the right way, and you’ll always have visibility. Discover why Perforce is trusted by 9 of the 10 top semiconductor companies. We can help you set up event triggers to ensure that design teams are able to efficient, while maintaining full traceability and IP security.

Connect with one of our IP experts to learn how we can help you scale your events platform. You can get answers to your questions and gain access to evaluation resources to see how Helix IPLM by Perforce can benefit your business.

learn more about ip lifecycle management

Back to top