Today’s businesses must move at incredible speeds. They are looking for ways to ingest, unify and analyze the tsunami of data to gain smarter deeper insights to take action in the moment and drive their organization’s digital transformation. Enterprises that harness the power of their data and are able to gain real-time actionable insights at sub-second latency will be positioned to outperform their competitors, transforming the way they deliver customer and product experiences and optimize business operations.
At our Insight-Driven Organization Event in NYC last week, GigaSpaces hosted a packed house that included business and technical leaders, architects and IT professionals from a variety of industries. There was plenty of Networking, discussions on market challenges, trends and real-world use cases from GigaSpaces Technologies, Intel and Susquehanna International Group (SIG) about how they are developing and deploying innovative services to optimize business results.
We’ve compiled a recap of the highlights here for those who could not attend.
Vin Costello, SVP Sales & GM Americas, for GigaSpaces Technologies opened the event with taking a “raise your hand” poll on what industry the attendees were in. No matter what industry the audience was from, be it healthcare, pharmaceuticals, media/marketing, insurance or financial services, at the end of the day it’s about data, analyzing that data and extracting insights that will empower enterprises to make smarter business decisions.
Our speakers were invited to discuss how companies can move ahead from 3 different viewpoints. Data Governance, Latency and Real-time Analytics. Garry Wright of GigaSpaces presented a high level view of our technology and how it works from a technical perspective.
Fadi Zuhayri of Intel Corporation, one of our partners, discussed what Intel is doing from an AI and Machine Learning (ML) perspective.
Mike Cattell of Susquehanna International Group (SIG) discussed how SIG has used the Gigaspaces in-memory computing platforms for the past 12 years.
Garry opened with some information about GigaSpaces talking about real-time machine learning at scale.
As a consultant in the data analytics space before joining GigaSpaces and even now, Garry said he has only met a handful of companies that are actually data- driven.
Garry noted that most good data insights can be counter-intuitive which makes them more valuable but at the same time can make them harder to adopt.
Another barrier is accessing the data. The acquisition of data from the plethora of sources affects the timeliness of that data to drive insights to make impactful decisions. The main issue here is the acquisition of data using different technologies. “You need to consolidate your data, and move from dashboards that present historical – stale data to ones that show what is happening now, to facilitate proactive decision making.”
Real-time data is key, but that data is really only valuable if you enrich it with historical data to create better algorithms. The value that GigaSpaces brings to the enterprise is that it combines and enriches real-time streaming analytics with historic data to leverage valuable machine learning algorithms.
Garry stressed the need for simplifying architectures and discussed how enterprises are leveraging real-time machine learning models today to:
- Reduce maintenance and operational costs via predictive and preventative actions.
- Streamline and and optimize operations.
- Introduce new services and revenue streams.
Garry Wright, Director of Technology, GigaSpaces Technologies
Fadi Zuhayri, Director & Big Data Technology Evangelist, Intel
“We are moving towards a more data-centric world which is forging a path to deeper insights. We’re not talking seconds. We are talking microseconds.”
Big Data Analytics is the key that is driving this revolution. He discussed the three factors that are powering this development:
- Advanced computing – Technological power and speed
- Big Data Analytics
- Monetization
There are plenty of use cases as examples, one of the most relevant ones being precision recommendations of products based on real time data, combined with a customer’s history of purchases. This is something that Amazon has pioneered.
Fadi continued to talk about how Analytics and AI is driving businesses to the next phase.
“We (Intel) want to make it faster and easier for people like you to innovate and gain insights faster and in a more affordable way”
Companies need to bring in technology to make AI more mainstream, and not just something that the corporate giants are doing.
In-memory analytics is the new revolution and
“GigaSpaces has been a key member of harnessing the power of persistent memory”
If you missed the event, you can download Fadi’s presentation here.
Mike Cattell, Electronic Options Trading – Production Engineering Team Lead, Susquehanna International Group (SIG)
Since joining SIG in 1999, Mike has worked on several Trading systems as well as infrastructure projects. He is currently Team Lead for SIG’s Options Trading Production Engineering Team which is responsible for data fabric technologies, hardware footprint, and data generation.
SIG prides themselves on building virtually all their trading technology from scratch. In this session, Mike discussed how SIG is leveraging the GigaSpaces Platform, to power their high performance, low latency trading solutions for optimal decisions– supporting 3 geographical locations at millisecond speeds.
SIG has a sizable hardware footprint with over 7,000 servers spread globally and the company is always looking at new tech and how to move ahead. The company employs best of breed solutions and has been leveraging GigaSpaces In-Memory Computing platforms for high scale, low latency, distributed data fabric for their mission critical applications.
They needed a collaborative partner who would help them to optimally design their solution where their data was to be shared by thousands of applications in multiple geographical locations.
“It needed to work. Period. And GigaSpaces helped us get the performance we needed. We like to think of GigaSpaces as better than Human Reaction time. It’s instantaneous.”
Mike noted that GigaSpaces has adapted SIG’s challenges over the past 12 years and actually pointed out that:
“
GigaSpaces helped us survive the financial implosion”
We’d like to thank our guest speakers and the attendees for an exciting and thought provoking morning.
