How COVID Is Redefining Future IT Priorities

If 2020 proved anything in business, it’s that the companies that were ahead of the game in executing digital transformation programs were best positioned to weather the turbulence and, in the case of our customers, thrive when users were forced to shift to an entirely online engagement model.

For example, since early 2020 when the world began to shelter, our digital payments customers – who collectively process nearly half of the world’s B2C digital transactions – have seen market capitalizations grow by 50%. Similarly, our e-commerce customers have had valuations grow between 50-100% in 2020.

Why? Revenue growth. As Disraeli said, “The secret of success is being ready when your opportunity comes.”

Hazelcast is focused on servicing the world’s largest organizations. The architectural proactivity and aggressiveness of our customers make them market leaders. By prioritizing digitization, they had been laying the groundwork for the business resilience that is needed to thrive in a “new normal.”  

Judging from the post-COVID growth in demand we’ve experienced throughout the year, the previous pace of digital transformation projects has been kicked into high gear. This acceleration is driving increased clarity for what 2021 holds in terms of technology projects.

Time Is Money

The new use cases we are seeing cover a broad spectrum of innovations, all of which leverage Hazelcast’s fast, cloud-native application platform in a wide variety of ways. A few of the many examples:  

• Using event stream processing for high-performance payment processing
• Powering fast ML-driven recommendation engines for recommendation engines and higher-value cart checkouts
• Moving from end-of-day batch processing to mini-batches throughout the day to reduce a firm’s trade risk profile
• Texting personalized product promotions to customers while at the ATM

Resilience Matters

When mission-critical applications go digital, they’re always-on. The cost of downtime can be devastating. To achieve business resiliency without back-breaking redundancies, enterprises are adopting proven distributed systems that can survive anything from an unresponsive server to a downed availability zone in the cloud.

Mainstream Adoption

Leveraging a fast application platform is not for just the early adopters anymore. For example, with IBM now selling Hazelcast directly, enterprises everywhere are seeing the many ways in which they can advance their architectures. The range of implementations is huge, from hybrid cloud projects to mainframe modernization to widely distributed IoT solutions.

This year will go down in IT history as a year of punctuated change. We are leaning hard into the future through expanded investment in platform innovation delivered through major partners including IBM, Intel, AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The new year is right around the corner. Let’s thrive together.