Why I Joined Hazelcast – Seizing the Moment in the Real-Time Economy

Why did I join Hazelcast?

1. Hazelcasters: Culture is critical to me and it starts with leadership. At Hazelcast, I have the opportunity to work with a super-intelligent, strategic and collaborative team passionate about helping our customers on their real-time journey. We attract strong talent, empower them to succeed, and guide their career development.
2. Enabling Real-Time Innovation: The golden thread throughout my career has been educating people about breakthrough innovations in data and analytics to improve results. At Hazelcast, I have the opportunity to educate business leaders and developers who want help to enable real-time automated actions. By harnessing the fresh, new data streaming 24/7 and instantly joining that with deep contextual data hidden in databases, businesses are getting measurable business results, including growing revenue by acquiring and retaining customers, cutting costs, and mitigating risk. In addition, I want to help business leaders get better results by seizing the moment in real time.
3. Hazelcast Customers: Hazelcast works with many Fortune 500 brands around the globe and we’re building a community of real-time innovators in financial services, banking, retail/e-commerce, transportation, and other industries.

Let’s dive into what’s happening in the market.

Are You Ready to Compete in the Real-Time Economy?

While many business leaders doubled down to accelerate their digital transformation efforts during the pandemic, business customers and consumers raised their expectations – again.

No one wants to wait. Time is precious. People want instant gratification while they are interacting with a business, regardless of whether they are browsing, shopping, ordering, banking, traveling, or having a bad experience.

That means the bar is raising for business leaders. Offering a personalized product or service, resolving a problem, or taking action one day, one hour or one minute later is too late.

Think about the travel disruption caused by a national airline in December 2022. More than 16,700 flights were canceled, leaving families and staff stranded over the holidays. Ultimately, the airline needed to resolve customer and employee problems faster. So how did it happen?

It turns out outdated IT infrastructure is to blame. Although some parts of their infrastructure could automate actions in real-time (alerting people of canceled flights), they didn’t have a fully enabled real-time business. They are not alone. Although business leaders have worked with IT to update some of their infrastructure for real-time automated action, it just takes one bottleneck, or weak link in the chain, for things to start falling apart.

Moments matter. Opportunities pass in an instant.

Which companies are leading in this real-time economy? Look no further than Meta/Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet/Google (FAANGs). They act in real time by unlocking the superpower of combining new and historical data and leveraging ML to automate actions. The result? The ability to respond to customers’ expectations in real-time, delivering highly personalized experiences and adapting in the moment to drive more revenue, cut costs, and mitigate risk.

Why has the bar been raised for non-FAANG executives? Because the people who use the FAANG services also use banks, healthcare providers, telcos, grocery stores, transportation, etc, and they expect the same real-time service level. As a result, the FAANGs are making it harder for companies in other industries to keep up.

Use Real-Time as a Strategic Weapon to Seize the Moment

All these successful digital businesses have one thing in common: They use real-time as a strategic weapon.

They present highly customized options while customers are online or when they need a service. Consumers receive shortlists that uniquely fit them and change in real time as their behavior changes. Carefully curated choices of search topics and ads, prospective friends, movie titles, social topics, and retail products happen in the background as best-fit options.

With each new click, the personalization is refined to the individual; choices change in real-time—and real-time innovators seize the moment.

But, on its own, fresh streaming data needs more context. So, to unlock its power, it must be put into the same data processing environment as historical or stored data, providing the context that informs the best action.

Don’t Let Legacy Infrastructure Hold You Back from Seizing the Moment

While the FAANGs have raised the bar of customer expectations, many business leaders face considerable challenges in pulling off the right action at the right time.

According to McKinsey’s “The Data-Driven Enterprise of 2025” report, “only a fraction of data from connected devices is ingested, processed, queried, and analyzed in real-time due to the limits of legacy technology structures, the challenges of adopting more modern architectural elements, and the high computational demands of intensive, real-time processing jobs.”

As a result, “companies often must choose between speed and computational intensity, which can delay more sophisticated analyses and inhibit the implementation of real-time use cases.”

Systems need to act in the moments that matter most.

But, most enterprise IT architectures are saddled with systems designed for batch processing of stored data, not real-time processing of fresh data that can enable automated action in the moment.

How do Facebook, Netflix and Google overcome this problem? They have armies of engineers building solutions that meet real-time needs. They need technology to help.

Start Your Journey to Become a Real-Time Innovator

Many business leaders across industries are trying to figure out how to become real-time innovators to seize the moment in the real-time economy. They want to enable their business to act faster by automating action on a massive scale.

The secret sauce requires using real-time streaming 24/7, combining it with historical data, and leveraging machine learning (ML) to automate real-time actions. But this isn’t easy to do when starting with legacy infrastructure – which does not impact the cloud-first, “Silicon Valley” companies. And the thought of ripping and replacing is as painful as it is time-consuming. The good news is just about any company can take steps to evolve from batch processing to solutions that support real-time automated action.

The Benefits of Real-Time Automated Action

Real-time innovators are working with Hazelcast to extend their current infrastructure with a modern layer that enables real-time automated action. As a result, they are seizing the moment and improving outcomes, such as:

1. Boosting revenue and improving customer experience during every interaction with personalized real-time offers. For example, BNP Paribas, captured a 400% increase in conversion rates on loans offered in the moment of need.
2. Cutting costs and mitigating risk with more robust fraud detection during every transaction. For example, a top 10 global bank improved fraud detection while improving customer satisfaction.
3. Gaining a competitive edge and saving developer time by simplifying the development and maintenance of real-time apps. Here is an example of a bank using real-time data to meet strict customer SLAs.

Why Wait? Seize the Moment

The Real-Time Economy is here, and there will be winners and losers across all industries. Real-time presents an opportunity to acquire and retain customers, cut costs and mitigate risk. Real-time innovators are embarking on a real-time journey to act in the moments that matter most to business customers and consumers. The good news is that newer technologies can quickly bring real-time responsiveness to companies across industries, and any company can begin its real-time journey now.

Don’t wait. I hope you take the opportunity to seize the moment in real time.

For more information on leveraging real-time data to drive your business forward, I recommend starting with these four use cases: What is real-time?

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