A New Brand Identity to Reflect Our Next Chapter of Growth

The time was right to launch a new brand for Hazelcast for two main reasons:

1. Hazelcast has evolved.
2. The market has evolved.

We created a new brand for our next chapter of growth with our innovative technology, its mission-critical role in helping companies respond faster to opportunities and threats, and the significant business value it delivers to our customers, including some of the world’s biggest global brands. And, we needed to educate the market that it’s time to take a fresh look at Hazelcast and www.hazelcast.com.

Reason #1: Hazelcast has evolved 

This new chapter of growth matters to Line of Business (LOB) leaders, enterprise and solution architects, and application developers. 

Many LOB leaders are looking to respond faster to opportunities and threats “in the moment” rather than “after the moment has passed.” 

However, this is a complex challenge for technical teams. Many architects and developers don’t know there’s an off-the-shelf solution for building real-time architectures. They resort to a costly DIY approach of integrating, maintaining and upgrading a complex architecture. Another challenge is this “real-time architecture” results in higher latency, so it doesn’t respond as quickly as business leaders or customers would like. 

Top brands use Hazelcast to modernize applications with a unified real-time data platform to act instantly on streaming data to create new revenue streams, mitigate risks, and operate more efficiently. 

Our customers have simplified their real-time architectures for next-gen applications requiring high performance at scale, security, and resilience. Our platform includes all the components needed to build a real-time architecture that enables applications to take instant action on streaming data, enriching it with stored data, while supporting MLOps. It enables two different approaches to processing streaming data: stream-act-store for “instant action” and stream-store-act for “after the fact” action. 

The architects and developers we work with no longer have to invest a ton of time and effort in dealing with the complexity of managing a do-it-yourself (DIY) real-time architecture. 

Bottom line: Say goodbye to DIY real-time architectures bogged down by complexity, cost, risk, and lag time. Say hello to a ready-to-go architecture that’s easy to develop, deploy, maintain, and upgrade with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). 

Our unified real-time data platform powers next-generation apps – from real-time payment processing and fraud detection to real-time inventory management, status updates, and offers…the possibilities are endless.   

Our customers are seeing big benefits, including:

Expectations Have Changed

In fact, I had a personal shopping experience recently where I saw the value of our technology firsthand. My 14-year old son needed new clothes. We went to his favorite online retailer (not a current customer), picked 5 items, paid for them and received an order confirmation. He couldn’t wait for them to be delivered. 

The next day, I received a notification that two of the items were out of stock! They issued an automatic refund, which was nice. But, I was frustrated that they didn’t have a real-time view of their inventory and they allowed me to buy out-of-stock items. 

This left a bad impression on me. My experiences with companies like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Uber, DoorDash and Domino’s—-which operate in real-time —-have shaped my expectations for instant action and instant satisfaction.

Here at Hazelcast, we now enable companies to seize the moment by taking instant action while a customer is banking, when a customer is shopping, during a fraudulent transaction, before a process breaks or while travelers are enroute, etc.

This is what companies need to be able to do to thrive in a digital, fast-paced, always-on world. 

Our goal is to ensure that those who are modernizing existing applications or building next-generation applications with real-time infrastructures can easily find us, learn how we can help them and include us in their real-time architecture technology evaluation.

Now our brand identity aligns with our new vision, the mission-critical nature of our technology and the business value that our technology delivers. Also, it aligns with the expectations of our innovative customers at some of the top brands in banking and financial services, insurance, consumer and e-commerce, high-tech, gaming and entertainment, public sector and telecommunications.

Reason #2: The market has evolved

 

Next, the market has evolved. There are 5 key trends driving the adoption of our unified real-time data platform. They are: 

1. Rising demand for immediate responsiveness. Like me, more people are demanding that the companies they do business with for personal or work needs can respond in real-time, with the right offers or solutions based on their specific needs. No wonder, the event stream processing platforms market grew by 13.4% in 2022, according to the Gartner Market Share Analysis, Event Stream Processing Platforms, Worldwide 2022 report. The ESP market grew above the average worldwide software market growth rate of 11.3%, indicating the increasing application of ESP platforms for real-time processing of proliferating streaming data. As Avtar Raikmo said, “the time is now – literally – for real-time stream processing.“

2. More data to inform instant action. With 5G networks and the increasing use of edge computing, which enables processing data at or near the source, as well as IoT data from connected devices, app developers have the opportunity to make their apps faster and more responsive. This trend will open up new opportunities for real-time, data-intensive apps.​ Here’s some great content on enriching Kafka applications with contextual data.
   ​
3. New technologies fuel innovation and opportunities. The stream processing vendor landscape is fragmented and changing quickly as new vendors enter the market, including Confluent, with its acquisition of Immerok, a fully managed Apache Flink cloud service for real-time stream processing applications, and MongoDB’s early access announcement of Atlas Stream Processing. These are examples of next-generation or stream processing 2.0 technologies.

5. Growth in real-time AI/ML. AI & Machine Learning are gaining popularity in app development and can enhance the user experience, automate tasks and make apps smarter. AI is well suited to personalize the user experience. ML predicts user behavior and makes recommendations. There’s a huge opportunity to make the use of ML inference in real-time apps a simpler process for data scientists who develop and train models in Python and the app developers who often build real-time apps in Java.​ Read this blog for more information.
6. Increasing modernization & digital transformation initiatives. ​Most companies are building next-generation applications and platforms with real-time architecture requirements. In a recent Forbes article by CEO Kelly Herrell, in which he states, “businesses will not succeed by acting tomorrow on what happened today.”

More Analysts Publishing Stream Processing Research 

It’s exciting to me that IT analyst firms are publishing reports that include both stream processing 1.0 and 2.0, the next-generation stream processing category of technology. So it’s important for us to communicate clearly about our differentiated value in this market with our unified real-time data platform and that our brand identity visually communicates our differentiation. 

And it’s not just the analysts. A few thousand people came together in San Jose, Calif. last week for Current 2023. As a gold sponsor, Hazelcast was proud to show off its unified real-time data platform and we enjoyed all of the conversations from the show. While Flink Forward is on the horizon – we’ll be there too – here are a few highlights from Current 2023.

.    .    .   

Want to learn more? Check out the following resources and reports:

• Gartner Market Guide for Event Stream Processing
• Forrester Streaming Data Platforms Landscape, Q3 2023 
• Hazelcast Recognized in Multiple Gartner Hype Cycle, Market Guide Reports for Event Stream Processing

Contact us to find out how we can help you unlock instant action. Say goodbye to DIY real-time architecture and hello to ready-to-go with a low TCO.