Hazelcast: The Real-Time Opportunity Enabling Companies to Take Instant Action

I recently had a negative customer experience traveling from Boston to New York, reinforcing the importance of our vision at Hazelcast: Enabling every business to act instantaneously and realize their real-time potential. 

My flight was delayed. So, I opened the airline’s mobile app to check the status of the inbound airplane. The time was 10:45am, and that was the only accurate information about the flight. Everything else was late, inaccurate information. So I wasn’t sure what to do: find a new flight out or wait for this flight to arrive? The application was clearly powered by older technology that didn’t enable a continuous flow of real-time information.

And this is the simplest of examples of what real-time means to business success. The business impact is far more significant when real-time capabilities are applied to business-critical applications. For example, real-time fraud detection and payment processing in financial services. Real-time inventory management in retail and manufacturing. Real-time shipping information in logistics. Real-time patient monitoring in healthcare. There are opportunities everywhere to take instant action for greater business impact.

The industry will begin understanding the difference between streaming data and stream processing—and demand the latter. Right now the two get conflated, but they are radically different yet wildly complementary.

At Hazelcast, we’ve been leading the real-time business movement for years. Now, we’ve taken a bold step in advancing our brand.

Our new brand is borne from our experience working with the world’s largest enterprises and helping them achieve a competitive advantage. They win by taking instant action in the moment of opportunity, rather than after the opportunity has passed. They are setting the bar for what every other company will soon need to do, too, or be surpassed by those that do.

We built our “unified real-time data platform” to enable customers to take steps and win in the real-time economy. With our platform, businesses can simplify the process of building next-generation application architectures and modernizing existing ones that require instant action.

The Change Agent

Within the technology market, the adoption of streaming data is the new normal. However, stream processing – not just moving data, but using it – is the change agent in the data sphere. Being able to take advantage of streaming data — instantly, not a day or week later — has become a mainstream requirement. Hazelcast offers uniquely valuable capabilities in this way, and the world’s most trusted analysts are now publishing on this fact.

Several things will occur as demand for what we do continues to grow, including advances in:

• Awareness. The industry will begin understanding the difference between streaming data and stream processing—and demand the latter. Right now, the two get conflated, yet they are radically different and wildly complementary. Streaming data is moving data. It is valuable information about something that is happening right now. Processing data while it’s in flight is the next logical step. That’s stream processing. To stream data and not take advantage of its hidden value – by processing it at the same time – is a huge missed opportunity. Most of our competitors ignore this fact, and as a result, most businesses don’t realize the full potential of their growing reams of streaming data. That means they’re missing out on being able to compete in the real-time economy, which is the one we are in today.

• Merging Data Types. The most aggressive adopters will realize that stream processing by itself quickly hits limits in terms of its usefulness. The moving data —- which is new—-reflects current activity, such as a changed aircraft arrival time, a payment request, or a user’s attempt to buy something online. Each of those actions create small payloads of data – “events” – that move from point A to point B on enterprise message buses or in communication between microservices.  But those small event packets have zero context. That’s hidden in databases, where rich history is stored, such as traveler details, payer/payee profiles, and online buying patterns. So naturally, merging the current activity with the contextual value lets a company take informed, instant action the moment the opportunity presents itself – to inform travelers, transfer funds, or cross-sell a customer.

• Intelligence. The logical next step is using stream processing to power ML-driven applications for inference based on what’s happening in the moment. That will enable companies to meet customer needs instantly, even before the customer is aware that they will be having that need shortly—based on previous patterns. 

The Art of the Possible

True innovators see where the world is going—and then get there first. Our new brand will help more enterprises understand the art of the possible and rapidly advance their capabilities to the level of real-time business while increasing our recognition as the leader in this rapidly evolving data processing space.

Unlock the power of instant action for your business, today.