Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Abe Kleinfeld, CEO of GridGain Systems
Powering Digital Businesses in 2020 - Data Integration Hubs powered by In-Memory Computing
2020 promises to be a pivotal year in the adoption
of in-memory computing across enterprises, largely to address their
insatiable need to drive real-time business processes based on a 360-degree
view of their data.
Data Integration Hub architectures allow users to implement
high-throughput, large-scale, low-latency front-end services, and DIH architectures
can span multiple source databases and cloud-based systems while supporting the
operation of large numbers of end user-facing business applications. Hundreds
of companies have implemented DIH architectures, and this trend will accelerate
in 2020 as companies seek methods to reduce
the number of API calls on mission-critical, cloud-based
solutions while simultaneously expanding data access for driving real-time
business processes. DIH architectures can also reduce complexity by creating a
single data access layer from which myriad applications can pull data, and they
can decouple front-end applications from back-end data stores.
This can be illustrated with a use case. Imagine your
company operates brick and mortar retail stores. You sell products through your corporate
website as well as in-store. You likely run business applications in your
datacenter while also using SaaS applications for services such as billing. Customers
can buy your products both online and in-store. As the volume of requests from
your customer-facing applications increases, the number of API calls to the
SaaS applications increases as well. SaaS solutions often suffer from latency
issues and have limits on API calls that can greatly affect your company's
ability to serve your customers quickly and profitably. This is similar to the
situation described in the keynote
presented by 24 Hour Fitness at the In-Memory Computing Summit North
America.
Now suppose you want to reduce the API calls on your SaaS
applications and have global access to all of your data in one datastore that
can support your custom application logic. A cost-effective way to do this is
with a Data Integration Hub (DIH) architecture. Gartner has defined DIH as an
advanced application architecture that aggregates multiple back-end data
sources into a low-latency and scale-out, high-performance data store (i.e. an
in-memory platform). A DIH architecture can be deployed to cache your many data
sources, whether they are internal applications or SaaS solutions, with an
in-memory computing platform like Apache Ignite®. Using a DIH, all your
data, both on-premise and in the cloud, can now be made available to all of
your applications through a highly performant and scalable common data access
and processing layer. This results in lowering the number of API calls while
increasing the availability of your data at in-memory speeds.
Beyond the use case above, a DIH architecture can enable
automated real-time business processes in industries such as financial
services, healthcare, supply chain and more, where systems can react instantly to
real-time business demands based on 360-degree access to an organization's
data.
Gartner previously predicted that 2020 will be the year in
which in-memory
computing will be incorporated into most mainstream products. As companies
begin to understand the capabilities and benefits they can gain from a Digital Integration
Hub architecture, in-memory computing will also become a foundational
technology in most enterprise data centers.
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About the Author
Abe Kleinfeld serves as GridGain's president & CEO
and has transformed the company into the leading in-memory computing platform
provider. Since joining in 2013, Abe has led the company through five years of
triple-digit average annual growth, $29M in Series B venture financing and
numerous awards including being named to the Inc. 500 list of America's fastest
growing private companies for the past two years. GridGain is also known for founding
and producing the annual In-Memory Computing Summit, the world's first and only
in-memory computing conference.
Abe's career spans four decades, dating
back to his start as a software engineer at Raytheon Data Systems, and
marketing and sales management roles at Oracle Corporation and Wang
Laboratories. Abe holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from State
University of NY at Oswego, and is an avid photographer and science fiction
fan.