A central challenge for any digital transformation initiative is dealing with the ever-increasing pace of change – in the marketplace, in the technology environment, and in the world at large. Clearly, as customer expectations accelerate, our technology must keep up. Squeezing every last millisecond of performance leads to the demand for real-time – technology with no delays whatsoever, moving at the speed of thought itself.
If we examine this real-time requirement more closely, however, important nuances emerge. First, real-time never actually means instantaneous, as it always takes a certain amount of time for bits to find their way to their destination. But even more important for any digital professional to understand, the concept of real-time has several subtly different meanings – and understanding the differences is critical for making effective technology decisions.
What is Real-Time, Anyway?
From the perspective of the digital effort, the most important definition of real-time is low latency. Latency refers to how long a web site or app takes to respond to a click or other user interaction (either on a computer or a mobile device), and thus the faster, the better. Consumers are notoriously fickle, after all – add a few milliseconds of delay and they’ll defect in droves.
Real-time may also refer to up-to-date information. In a breaking news situation, for example, people want the very latest information. I heard about the latest California earthquake in real-time from friends on Twitter – the news Web sites were at least ten minutes behind. Real-time airline or theater seat availability falls under this definition as well.
A third sense of real-time refers to human interactions. If you and your gamer buddies are going after zombies in a multiplayer game, for instance, you want the action to be real-time. Online voice conversations and some fast-paced auction sites also require this type of real-time.
Finally, we may be referring to real-time processing of information. Stock trading and online ad placement are two of the most familiar examples. Yes, latency must be as low as possible, but the bottleneck isn’t just serving up information to the user – it’s all the number crunching behind the scenes that must also take place at a blisteringly fast pace.
With these various definitions in mind, then, let’s take a quick look at several software vendors who all have real-time offerings of one sort or another – and yet, all with different meanings of real-time.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2014/08/29/transforming-digital-business-in-real-time/.
At the time of writing, Fiorano Software and MapR Technologies are Intellyx customers. Aerospike, Profium, and AppDynamics are not. Image Credit: Alan Cleaver.
