What are real-time analytics, and what role do they play in a company’s profit, forecasting and market positioning?
After spending eight years at Facebook, engineering the infrastructure systems for data management, Venkat launched Rockset – and has further advanced his contribution to understanding and harnessing real-time analytics.
M.R. Rangaswami: What is real-time analytics and how does it fit into a company’s data strategy?
Venkat Venkataramani: Real-time analytics is all about using data as soon as it’s produced to answer questions, make predictions, understand relationships and automate processes. Modern data applications need to process different types of data from multiple sources to initiate specific actions in real-time, such as e-commerce personalization, IoT automation, logistics and delivery tracking, gaming leaderboards, and more.
Until recently, it has been challenging to deliver analytics at the speed and scale required by modern applications. Our company’s real-time analytics platform connects to your data, ingests and indexes any changes in real time, and provides sub-second SQL and data APIs without consuming unnecessary compute, enabling organizations to build data applications at cloud scale.
M.R.: How are real-time analytics helping organizations amid an economic downturn?
Venkat: The two most important recession-proofing tactics for enterprises are the ability to dial down operating costs through real-time process automation while simultaneously accelerating growth through digital customer experiences.
According to a recent study, US businesses have the opportunity to realize the largest overall impact on revenue increase – potentially $2.3 trillion – from leveraging real-time data analytics, with 73% of manufacturers reporting more efficient rollout processes and 67% of financial firms reporting greater efficiencies. Much like electricity delivers value on pay-per-usage basis, real-time analytics is quickly becoming the latest cloud innovation to provide fast analytics on real-time data on a consumption basis.
M.R.: Where do you see real-time analytics going in the years to come?
Venkat: 2022 is the year that real-time analytics is going mainstream. We’ve seen strong growth in real-time data over the last several years as more companies are deploying modern, cloud-native data stacks. However, given the current bearish market economy, the efficiency and performance of data systems are more important than ever.
The ballooning costs of data warehouses that were not built for real-time data has driven the shift to real-time databases that are more optimized for critical use cases, including personalized experiences, security analytics, fleet management and leaderboard gamification, just to name a few.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com