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IQVIA joins AsyncAPI to simplify standardization and orchestration of event-driven applications
Omer Tosun, Director Ecosystem Architecture IQVIA
Fran Mendez, Director AsyncAPI
Jun 12, 2020

The industry need

In order to drive tools to build modern, real-time applications that allow event-driven engagement with end customers, there was a need for an industry standard for defining asynchronous, event-driven APIs in a machine-readable format. Open-source project AsyncAPI is one such community where developers and industry leaders are working on these new tools.

About AsyncAPI

AsyncAPI is an API documentation specification for how event-driven services communicate with one another. As an emerging language standard, IQVIA is a platinum sponsor of the project with the goal of changing the way businesses execute event processing via APIs. IQVIA and AsyncAPI share a common mission to standardize event-driven API interactions and support the wide variety of messaging systems available. IQVIA’s Lexi API standard vocabulary for the Life Sciences industry will align with AsyncAPI’s universal language for all the different messaging protocols and event schema formats. IQVIA joins two of its key technology partners MuleSoft and Salesforce in sponsoring the effort.

How AsyncAPI and IQVIA are perfectly matched

AsyncAPI founder Fran Mendez says that IQVIA is helping the open-source project to create a holistic solution for building event-driven apps and that event-driven APIs and the developing standard (AsyncAPI specification) can help companies evolve to event-driven thinking to solve problems in new ways.

AsyncAPI is important because it empowers more developers than ever before to unlock the value of events and asynchronous APIs, making IT architectures far more efficient than they are with request-response structures. “The real difference between the request-response paradigm and the event-driven world is that events and messages allow your system to be real-time and reactive, as opposed to waiting until a request from the client is made. The server pushes the update when the time is right, no request needed,” explains Mendez. The open-source nature of the AsyncAPI spec means it does not enforce any protocol, and it is interoperable with any messaging system, including MQTT, Kafka, WebSockets, and more. Fran emphasized “IQVIA’s Lexi initiative is a key step in the right direction for the Life Sciences industry to make event-driven communication accessible and easy to adopt. The future is event-driven, and IQVIA is in a good place to contribute to and leverage the AsyncAPI initiative for the benefit of its customers.”

Lexi – creates a common lexicon for the life sciences industry

IQVIA has been closely associated with the project and leverages the technology in its Lexi product. Lexi is an Application Programming Interface (API) layer that connects applications and data using a common vocabulary or lexicon. IQVIA has created a common lexicon for the life sciences industry which enables the creation of universal connectors for information exchanges across a network of internal and external applications.

Taking it a few steps further, Lexi powers a premier integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution. Lexi is part of the platform’s mediation layer, where the data translated into the common Lexi vocabulary is evaluated, with a code look-up service and entity relationship service assisting with the identification and standardization of data record IDs. Lexi leverages best in class IPaaS technology to achieve full ecosystem orchestration. Key components of Lexi are the coordination layer (which houses the orchestration logic) and the mediation layer (which houses Lexicon that allows seamlessly translations between all applications in the ecosystem).

Lexi significantly reduces costs and simplifies the complexity of integrating technology systems, while capturing insights about markets, trends and opportunities that life sciences companies need for continued growth.

Conclusion

Lexi has been developed as an event driven architecture. AsyncAPI underlines this strategy and IQVIA is proud to support this innovative initiative. Lexi significantly reduces costs and simplifies the complexity of integrating applications. Historically, the maintenance of point-to-point (P2P) integrations among applications requires significant resources. Lexi modernizes the interconnectivity of proprietary applications, streamlines maintenance and improves speed to integration.

Click here to learn more about Lexi from IQVIA.
Click here to learn more about the AsyncAPI initiative.

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