Hazelcast is Mentioned as a Unified Real-Time Platform in the Gartner Market Guide for ESPs

The 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Event Stream Processing, or ESPs, introduces a new subcategory of streaming—unified real-time (data) platforms—and mentions Hazelcast in that category.

ESPs consist of software systems that continuously process their business’ streaming data, which originates in ever-increasing amounts from customer interactions, devices, and other computer systems.

According to the Market Guide report, “Unified platforms combine many or all of the features of an ESP platform with a DBMS or in-memory data grid and a programmable application engine. Unified platforms are a relatively new kind of infrastructure software that supports operational or analytical business applications that need to process both streaming data in motion and historical data at rest.”

Gartner also noted that, “Unified platforms can be partly seen as an evolution of ESP platforms, and they are an alternative to ESP platforms for some applications. However, they are not relevant for situations that only involve asynchronous data flow processing of streaming data in motion where an ESP platform suffices.”

Action Now

We like being “new,” as part of an “evolution” and as an “alternative.” That means we’re already where the market is moving—not chasing after it. Gartner points out that ESP systems are used for operational and analytical workloads. It’s the operational side that we specialize in and where we see growth in the market, especially when responding in real-time.

Certainly, we can support the streaming data integration component of ESP systems that leads to analytical workloads.

But, as we always say, companies no longer win in the market by acting today on data that was born yesterday. Yesterday is now too late. Consumers and businesses want personalized offers on products and services that meet their needs at the exact moment they need them met—not an hour, a day, a week, or even a minute later.

While other offerings focus on streaming data integration – where you transform streaming data to store it into a database – Hazelcast is about instant action and helping businesses respond in real-time. With Hazelcast, companies benefit from new streaming data mixed with historical data to inform the right action at the right time.

How to Come Along

We know it isn’t easy to modernize legacy infrastructure, for any company of any size. But the cost of inaction is too high.

Companies like Meta, Google, Apple, and others are already leading the instant economy to new heights, in which new and old data inform instant actions. Yet, not every company has the in-house engineering muscle to do the same, and that’s where we, and other ESPs, come in.

Unified real-time platforms combine multiple components of an ESP architecture into a single platform. The advantages here are clear:

• Simplified development due to less integration coding.
• Simplified deployment due to fewer clusters and nodes to deploy.
• Greater efficiency due to the consolidation of capabilities in the same cluster.

In addition, the unified integration leads to fewer network hops that enable higher performance and lower latency for use cases that depend on speed, scale, or both.

Reducing Cost and Complexity

Business leaders may perceive that achieving real-time capabilities is expensive and complex. This perception might be based on the fact that you cannot use legacy, batch-oriented tools to create real-time responsiveness. Additionally, real-time capabilities built on ESP platforms typically involve a variety of technologies that need to be integrated together, which adds to infrastructural complexity.

With a unified real-time platform, we do the heavy-lifting and make it easy for companies to get real-time capabilities with streaming and historical data.

Choosing an ESP Platform

In the Market Guide, Gartner provides insights into the market’s direction and some recommendations on choosing the right ESP platform for your needs.

We suggest to our customers that they first identify the business outcomes they want to achieve.

• For example, are you trying to boost revenue for particular products? Are you trying to cut costs in certain parts of your operation? Are you trying to protect the business and mitigate risks?
• If so, what are your ideas on achieving those objectives, and how does data fit in?

We’ve seen great examples of where a business would define a goal and then identify a technology approach on how to get there.

BNP Paribas achieved a 400% increase in real-time loan offer conversions by integrating Hazelcast within its existing architecture. They sought to deliver better offers by blending real-time data with historical data and act automatically – while creating self-service promotion logic to define offers without IT intervention.

BNP’s case study provides a great story on how a business objective can become a reality without an overhaul and risk.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage

From our point of view: business and IT professionals seeking to gain a competitive advantage by making more use of their real-time data should explore ESP platforms, and unified real-time (data) platforms, especially.

Gartner, Market Guide for Event Stream Processing, W. Roy Schulte, Pieter den Hamer, Ehtisham Zaidi, 15 May 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.