Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Nikita Ivanov, CTO and founder, and Terry Erisman, VP of Marketing,
GridGain Systems
Companies See In-Memory Computing as Critical to Their Digital Transformation
As many predicted last year, 2017 was the year when
organizations began to recognize that undergoing a digital transformation could
enable them to deliver better user experiences, improved financial results, and
allow them to more effectively compete. Although a few organizations are now
far along on their digital transformation journeys, most are just beginning to
understand how to make it a reality. We believe that 2018 will be the year when
the technology requirements for moving forward become widely recognized and
standardized. And whether the goal is ensuring an excellent customer
experience, developing end-to-end, automated business processes across multiple
enterprise and cloud systems, delivering real-time web-scale applications,
implementing Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, or another strategy to unlock
the value of data in their enterprise, in-memory computing will be one of the
foundational technologies that will be a part of nearly every solution. Here
are three specific predictions on the evolution of in-memory computing in 2018.
1. "In-memory data grids are
already a mainstream solution in many industries to
deliver speed, scalability and high availability for application
processing. I expect this trend to accelerate in 2018 as more
enterprises recognize the need for greater performance
and scalability and the solutions become increasingly affordable as the
cost of RAM declines. Further, echoing predictions from
industry analysts such as Gartner and others, I'm
certain adoption of data grids and other in-memory
computing technologies - including in-memory databases
and non-volatile memory - will continue to surge as
organizations increasingly recognize these technologies are
essential to the success of their vital digital transformation
initiatives." -Nikita Ivanov, CTO and founder, GridGain Systems
2. "In the coming year, companies will push the boundaries
of computing to new limits using in-memory computing. Over the
past several months, we've seen bellwether companies adopt in-memory
computing platforms to attain the extreme speed and scale they
need for their digital transformations. Sberbank, one of the
largest banks in the world, is building an in-memory computing system on
commodity servers that rivals the world's most powerful supercomputers. Wellington Management is
managing $1 trillion in assets using in-memory computing to manage their
investment book of record (IBOR) rather than relying on traditional computing
methods. And Workday now processes an average of about 189
million transactions a day which compares favorably to the roughly 500 million
tweets a day sent by Twitter. These types of massive computing
performance will become the norm as companies worldwide follow suit
by deploying in-memory computing technology to support their digital
transformation initiatives and compete at this new pace of
business." - Terry Erisman, VP of Marketing, GridGain Systems
3. "In-memory computing solutions and traditional disk-based
databases are converging over time and this trend will continue to
accelerate in 2018. In-memory data grids are powerful
for accelerating existing systems built on disk-based databases while in-memory databases
are used mainly to build greenfield systems. Nearly every business undergoing a
digital transformation will eventually need to employ in-memory
computing architectures that keep all vital data in-memory, providing the speed
and scale they need to deliver acceptable application performance for
customers, employees and the supply chain in the face of massive data growth.
The primary question is how well traditional relational databases which are
adding in-memory capabilities on top of disk-based architectures can compete
with the new generation of in-memory computing solutions which were designed
from the ground up to use memory first and disk only as backup. - Nikita
Ivanov, CTO and founder, GridGain Systems
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About the Authors
Nikita Ivanov is founder of the Apache Ignite project and CTO of GridGain Systems, started in 2007. Nikita has led GridGain to develop advanced and distributed in-memory data processing technologies - the top Java in-memory data fabric starting every 10 seconds around the world today.
Nikita has over 20 years of experience in software application development, building HPC and middleware platforms, contributing to the efforts of other startups and notable companies including Adaptec, Visa and BEA Systems. Nikita was one of the pioneers in using Java technology for server side middleware development while working for one of Europe's largest system integrators in 1996.
He is an active member of Java middleware community, contributor to the Java specification. He is also a frequent international speaker with over 50 talks at various developer conferences globally in the last 5 years.
With over 25 years of technology marketing experience, Terry Erisman has initiated and driven high revenue growth for a multitude of award-winning companies in the SaaS, open source, and enterprise software sectors. Prior to joining GridGain, he was vice president of marketing for Citus Data, where he was responsible for worldwide marketing and established the first annual PGConf Silicon Valley Conference for the PostgreSQL community. Before Citus Data, Erisman was chief marketing officer at Percona, Inc. Erisman was also instrumental in helping Percona take over, manage, and grow the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo held in Silicon Valley, London, and New York. Prior to Percona, Erisman held executive management positions at DotNetNuke, Project Hosts, CaseCentral, Intevac and Atcor. Percona, DotNetNuke, and CaseCentral were all named to the Inc. 500/5000 list during his tenure.
He holds a Master's in Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an A.B. in Chemistry from Harvard University.