Moving Beyond Batch with the Hazelcast Platform 5.1

The last decade or so has been particularly interesting for enterprise technologies and data. After living so many years in the kingdom of the RDBMS, we began branching out to experience new innovations in this millennium. We believe the latest release of the Hazelcast Platform represents another big step forward in innovations around data processing. But to give some context on why new data-oriented innovations are emerging, let’s first look at a big shift that started a little more than a decade ago.

One trend that will have lasting effects is the science around “batch processing,” which has become a well-known practice with data-driven companies around the world. We’ve become experts in collecting terabytes and petabytes of data, submitting complex processing jobs, and delivering a refined data set that’s ready for value-creating analysis. The rise of big data platforms and accompanying technologies made large-scale batch processing a reality. We talked about commodity hardware, distributed systems, data locality, and elasticity, and we made huge strides in making data even more valuable to our businesses. Data became more than just a small part of a big machine; it was comparable in importance to both bacon and oil.

What’s the next big trend after large-scale batch processing? Does there even need to be a “next”?

What we see as the next big challenge and opportunity for enterprise IT is the focused delivery of real-time capabilities that expand upon all the data innovations of the last several years. Batch processing was good at helping you to make the right decisions, and real-time is about helping you make the right decisions at the right moment. But certainly “real-time” is not a new concept, so why does it rise to the level of a hot new trend?

The fact is, real-time is becoming more top-of-mind because it’s getting harder to achieve. We are spending more time today thinking about how to hit that moving target. After all, you see “real-time” all the time from the leading companies that provide goods and services that you consume on a daily basis. These are the products that are not only relevant to work or school, but are fully integrated into your everyday life. Social media, e-commerce, mobile devices, streaming video, and Internet activities as a whole, all are significant parts of your world. And the companies that provide these goods to you are some of your favorite brands. You like them not only for what they do, but also how they do it. You appreciate the compelling, engaging experiences they provide, and they continue to make improvements even though you don’t ask them to.

Most of these experiences are driven by real-time responsiveness, and the more responsive these companies are, the more loyal we become. And because of today’s leading companies, we continually increase our expectations around instant gratification, and these expectations aren’t limited to just the Internet-based companies. These expectations are projected onto our banks, health care providers, phone service providers, delivery services, and every other business we work with.

These leading companies continually raise the bar, making it harder for the rest of us. Considering that most other businesses do not hire buildings full of software developers to create innovative customer experiences, how can one expect to keep up?

A big part of meeting the challenge is acknowledging the history of batch processing. Remember that a new paradigm of batch processing technologies arose to meet the needs of large-scale batch processing, and the same technology shift is required for addressing real-time data.

That’s where the Hazelcast Platform comes into the picture. Instead of hiring your own team of engineers to build the next generation of IT systems, explore what our experts have built to give you a headstart on your initiatives. Hazelcast has its roots in delivering data with ultra-fast speeds, but also includes a real-time processing engine to automate activities that are time-sensitive and cannot be addressed with human intervention. This combination of instantaneous processing and fast data access is a key advantage for our customers as they search out more ways to gain competitive advantage.

So we’ve got speed and instantaneous action covered for you, but those are obviously not the only requirements in real-time IT infrastructures today. You also need efficiency, reliability, and security, all with the simplicity to reduce development and maintenance efforts. Our engineers continually focus on building a real-time data platform that delivers quality across the board.

With Hazelcast Platform 5.1, we are adding new capabilities that can help you get even more value from data and from real-time responsiveness. With our tiered storage capabilities, you now have access to larger data sets to provide more critical context to your actionable data, enabling you to take better action as a response to uncovered insights in your data trends and patterns. Expanded SQL support lets you query your data in a familiar way so you can supplement real-time actions with drill-down analysis. Other capabilities in this release help to simplify the maintenance of a Hazelcast cluster so that you can focus more on business logic and less on the infrastructure.

If you haven’t already, check out some of our customer case studies to learn how we’ve helped our customers achieve real-time capabilities, and consider how you might be able to attain similar results.