Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Hazelcast?

A software revolution is underway at Hazelcast.

The company, led by Chief Executive Officer Kelly Herrell, is on a mission to help businesses become truly "real-time" enterprises. Speaking in an interview, Herrell offered a clear view of Hazelcast's purpose and the opportunities driving its technology.

"Hazelcast is a software and cloud company, and we turbo charge applications in a way that enables customers to transform into real-time businesses," she said. "Our offering is an ultralight, high-performance data processing platform that can act on streams and events in the very moment that they're generated."

What sets Hazelcast apart, Herrell explained, is its ability to react to and analyse streaming data while simultaneously combining that information with rich contextual data already stored in databases. "Hazelcast is entirely unique in this combined capability," she said, "and this is how we enable customers to not just have insight but actually act instantaneously on data everywhere – whether it's in the data centre or in the cloud."

The shift to real-time is being driven by mounting macro trends. According to Herrell, "the era of IT centralisation is in long-term decline. As the world becomes increasingly more connected, it is also becoming more decentralised." At the same time, digital transformation is fuelling an explosion in data creation. "More data will be generated in the next three years than was generated in the last 30," she said, pointing out that this deluge comes from a growing number of sources in a decentralised digital world.

Yet this opportunity is not without its challenges. "This is something customers really struggle with," Herrell shared. "To take advantage of this flood of new data – and the majority of it is in the form of events and streams – requires a different approach." She noted that events could be anything from messaging or sensor feeds, to stock tickers, to every click in an e-commerce environment. "Every time somebody clicks a button, it creates an event and sends that event from point A to point B," she said.

The challenge, however, is that these events often lack context in isolation. "They know that click stream happened, but they don't also have access to all the detail behind the user in order to do something meaningful with that event," Herrell explained. "We're really helping customers become real-time businesses."

Hazelcast's product development is closely aligned with these industry shifts. "One is this ability to simultaneously process event streams and store data in the same application workspace – that's something that we invented as a software company, and it's unique to Hazelcast," Herrell said.

She also highlighted ongoing improvements in analytics and machine learning, crucial for leveraging richer data context. "We're going to be making substantial improvements in analytics and machine learning so that applications can take advantage of that capability," she said. Further, Hazelcast is extending its hybrid cloud capabilities as architectures become more distributed. "The world is decentralised and architectures are increasingly hybrid. As workloads are moving, processing areas are moving, so we're going to be increasing that capability," she added.

A critical part of the plan is addressing the proliferation of data silos. "We're going to continue to advance our ability to pull data very easily from any data source through a wide range of ecosystem connectors," she explained. "Hazelcast loves all sources of data – it could be Kafka, it could be relational databases – we sit right in the middle and we're going to make it very, very easy for people to just point, click and connect."

These innovations are already bearing fruit in the real world. Herrell shared a compelling example from the financial sector. "We do a lot of work in the financial services arena, and one of the things a large European retail bank wanted to do was increase their origination of consumer loans," she said. The bank realised that opportunities were being missed because the process relied on outdated, lagging approaches.

Using Hazelcast, the bank was able to develop a solution whereby "when the customer goes to the ATM and logs in – that login is an event. That event then triggers a series of processing capabilities on the back end," she described. The system checks account balances and looks for patterns, such as whether the customer's balance is near zero but likely to increase on payday, or analyses spending behaviour and credit scores.

"All of this is happening through a combination of processing rich contextual data along with eventing, while the customer is still standing at the ATM," she said. The result? The customer receives a personalised loan offer via text, calculated instantly for custom amount, duration, and interest rate. "By doing that, the bank increased their retail loan origination by 400 percent," Herrell said.

"That's what a real-time business is – it's not after the fact. You have to act in the moment. If you don't act in the moment, the opportunity has passed. But to act in the moment, you don't just need to know that the event occurred – you need the context behind it," Herrell explained.

This marriage of event and contextual data is at the heart of Hazelcast's mission. "Customers are utilising these solutions, but they're all predicated upon the change agent, which is this growth in event data and growth in stream data, and combining that with history-rich contextual data to do things that were never before possible," she said.

For those interested in Hazelcast's offerings, Herrell emphasised the flexibility of engagement. "We sell direct and indirect through partners. Just as an example, on a global scale, IBM resells Hazelcast today," she said. She welcomes both new customers and partners.

In closing, Herrell is pragmatic yet optimistic. "Thank you for having me," she said.