Hazelcast Platform V.5.1 to Eliminate Waiting, Improve Accuracy of Insights on Real-Time Data

Hazelcast Inc. is raising the bar for creating real-time advantages with the latest release of its run anywhere, real-time data platform.

The Hazelcast Platform enables enterprises to build business applications that take automated, immediate action on data, without the wait times associated with database writes and human intervention. The release boosts the analytical capabilities of a real-time system by enabling greater situational context to event and streaming data as it is created, yielding more meaningful insights. This release also adds extended query capabilities and higher availability via less maintenance downtime.

Announced in the summer of 2021, the company’s platform acts as a single data layer and access point for applications to call upon and execute transactional, analytical and operational workloads. With the integration of the real-time stream processing capabilities, the firm’s real-time data platform can begin processing the data while enriching it with the context of stored data before it is written. Processing and enriching data in motion saves application developers time that can translate to new revenue streams or reduced risk exposure.

Greater insights on real-time data
Combining streaming with an in-memory data store allows enterprises to enrich streaming data as it arrives with historical context from the data store. The addition of tiered storage to the company’s platform eliminates the complexity of adding more third-party databases to IT infrastructures by automatically managing the balance between the tiers of fast data and large-scale data. Tiered storage also allows customers to enrich real-time data with larger sets of historical reference data stored on disk/SSDs to create the required context. The result is that enterprises can now realize even deeper insights or actions as the larger dataset improves the overall contextual quality of the real-time analysis.

“When Hazelcast announced its platform last year, the ability to merge real-time data with historical context opened new possibilities to deliver the right offer or insights to the end-user at the right time,” said Manish Devgan, chief product officer. “By being able to work with datasets at scale within the same data platform, businesses can now enable even better outcomes in a much shorter window of time-to-market.“

Simplifying advanced analytics
The company’s SQL support was introduced in 2020 and its expansion to streaming provides business analysts, data engineers and data scientists a familiar language to create data pipelines for building real-time applications. The latest release includes streaming aggregation over fixed and hopping windows, additional SQL expressions, improved JOIN support and improved performance. Complementing support for ANSI SQL, Hazelcast added SQL support for JSON so that enterprises can store and query this popular data format for adding real-time processing capabilities to critical functions.

The firm is a member of the Streaming SQL Expert Group within the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) to help steer the standardization and innovation on streaming SQL.

Real-time economy
The company designed its real-time data platform with the goal of eliminating waiting in today’s digital world. Thanks to the architectural changes inspired by the current wave of digital transformation, including advances in cloud computing and AI/ML, many leading enterprises are on the cusp of offering products and services that deliver on the promise of the real-time economy.

To enable the real-time economy, one where actions are instantaneously taken and insights are immediately actionable, enterprises must move beyond batch processing and into a state of continuous processing of data as it’s originated. To keep pace with this new state of operations, enterprises require a real-time data platform that incorporates streaming and in-memory latencies, to operate anywhere and pull data from any source, including databases, data lakes and data warehouses.

Availability
Hazelcast Platform 5.1 is available via Hazelcast Cloud or as software to be deployed on-premises or within customers’ Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) cloud environments. The tiered storage feature is currently in beta and will be available for production use in an upcoming version of the firm’s platform.

“As a leading bank in the Nordics we work hard to offer the best to our customers. The Hazelcast Platform gives our customers an augmented user experience when processing their financial transactions, like payments and transfers. Adding real-time capabilities to our infrastructure means that we can always offer services to our customers whenever they want them and be able to anticipate their needs,” said an European Bank.

“For several years, Sorint.lab and Hazelcast have helped our joint customers leverage the benefits of in-memory data and in-memory computing to drive increased value for their businesses. As companies seek to take the next step in building and deploying real-time applications, the Hazelcast Platform is the only solution that can easily combine the ability to process and enrich real-time streams with the historical context, speed and low latency of an in-memory data store. Sorint looks forward to working with our combined customer base and helping them achieve the shortest time-to-value with the Hazelcast Platform,” said Luca Pedrazzini, CEO, Sorint.lab S.p.A.

“The distributed edge is an emerging area that needs solutions to reduce latency and improve the processing of data at the edge of the network. The Hazelcast Platform lets developers create a data grid that combines in-memory computing and real-time stream processing to support ultra-fast applications in a distributed fashion,” said Mary Jander, senior analyst, Futuriom

Resources:
Blog: Introducing Hazelcast Platform 5.1!    
Hazelcast Platform 5.1 (documentation)
The Forrester Wave: Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021