In-memory computing platform for data-intensive, web-scale applications.
The 42nd IT Press Tour had the opportunity to meet with Abe Kleinfeld, President & CEO of GridGain, the original creator of Apache Ignite and Apache Ignite experts. They develop and market the leading in-memory computing platform which delivers orders-of-magnitude improvements in speed and scale for web-scale applications, SaaS and cloud computing, mobile and IoT backends, real-time and compute-intensive processing, and big data analytics.
Digital transformations create new demands on business applications and data access. Applications must provide real-time performance and massive scalability but the time and cost of rearchitecting and building new, better infrastructure is problematic. Customer-facing apps need access to data across many internal systems but cloud computing disperses data across separate and isolated datastores and business applications and data stores are frequently data silos.
Use Cases
GridGain solves these challenges via two critical use cases. The digital integration hub aggregates multiple back-end data sources provides applications with high-performance data access and unified API future proofs for new applications. Application acceleration and scale out with OEM/embedded into software and SaaS products, data is cached in memory and parallel processing for real-time speed, distributed computing supports massive scalability of the in-memory layer.
Actual customer use cases include: equity trading platform, FRTB real-time compliance, investment book of record, e-commerce website acceleration, logistic planning and routing, fraud detection, real-time security alerting, new drug discovery, healthcare benefits cost control, VoIP call routing management, and real-time electric grid balancing.
GridGain has more than 200 customers in financial services, FinTech, software/cloud, telecom and mobile, IoT, adtech/media/entertainment, logistics and transportation, e-commerce and retail, and pharma and healthcare.
Case Studies
BNP Paribas Digital Integration Hub for transactional and analytical processing for corporate and investment banking.
BNP Paribas, the France-based global top-10 international banking group, needed a reliable and scalable mechanism to support its investment bankers in the management and analysis of static, market, and historical time-series data that was spread over 100 silos across different divisions and geographical locations of the bank while giving them tools to execute customized computational analysis.
Challenges:
Highly transactional and historical data in silos.
Numerous proprietary data structures across hundreds of sources.
Complex data pipelines.
A single view of data with low latency is critically important.
GridGain enables:
A single source of truth for the entire data pipeline and all operations.
Horizontal scalability and ultra-low latency for high-speed compute over high throughput transactional data.
Support for normalization across multiple data structures and time-series data.
High availability across data centers.
EssilorLuxottica: Digital Integration Hub for real-time order management and sales analytics.
EssilorLuxottica, the world's leading luxury eyewear manufacturer, distributor, and retailer has grown through acquisitions all over the world, with vertical integration, digitization, and omnichannel experience key to its strategic growth. To extract efficiencies out of its supply chain, gain visibility into sales across geographies and legal entities and provide a better customer experience. EssilorLuxottica needed a single view of its data across systems, channels, and regions.
Challenges:
Data spread across multiple systems, formats, and geographies.
Complex pricing, promotions, and business rules per region and legal entity.
Real-time updates and analytics.
GridGain enables:
Horizontally scalable data hub to support onboarding of acquired systems.
Parallelized, distributed computing to run real-time pricing calculations and sales analytics in milli-seconds.
Hybrid cloud-enabled and replicated for central management and consistency across channels and geographies.
UPS: Application Acceleration & Scale-Out for network simulation and planning.
UPS is a global package delivery and supply chain management solutions company. Its services include package deliveries with strict deliver-by SLAs. To consistently meet these SLAs and account for any kind of localized outage in a hub or a processing center, they need viable alternate shipping routes readily available. They achieve this by running simulations and building alternate "network plans" for the next 180-day window.
Challenges:
The turn-around time to execute a simulation must be low enough to process hundreds of thousands of simulations.
Data generation and simulation execution take more than a day.
Scaling is expensive and time-consuming.
GridGain enables:
Distributed in-memory computing supports running a full simulation within 2 to 3 hours.
Hybrid deployment capabilities allow provisioning and scaling to the cloud.
Execution of AI/ML models.
Optiva: Application Acceleration & Scale-Out for call data records management and charging engine.
Optiva provides business and operations technology to the telecommunications industry. One of its applications, Optiva Charging Engine, helps telco carriers charge their customers accurately for phone calls and data usage. Processing call data records exactly once, reliably and with ultra-low latency is key to winning business from carriers. They needed a reliable data management platform that would support small and large carriers alike.
Challenges:
Ensure no revenue loss for carriers by guaranteeing exactly-once processing of call data records in real-time.
Zero downtime, fault tolerance.
Single architecture that scales based on the carrier size and their subscriber base.
GridGain enables:
ANSI SQL and ACID support with strict consistency.
Transactional persistence for disk-based durability and very low recovery SLAs.
Hybrid deployment capability to support on-premise or cloud-based deployments.
GridGain Nebula
While many companies recognize the benefits of IMCP, many lack the in-house skillsets to deploy and manage it.
GridGain launched Nebula in 2021 to make deploying and maintaining a high-performance environment easy and cost-effective. It's available as a self-service SaaS model in the cloud or as a fully managed service on-premise or in the cloud.
Features include:
Multi-cloud support on GG cloud, AWS, Azure, or on-premise
Advanced monitoring and control
The ability to run mission-critical applications with extremely high availability
The ability to scale with cloud-native agility
Key Takeaways
GridGain has established market leadership in accelerating and scaling digital systems.
Strong customer traction across a number of vertical industries.
Accelerated demand in the digital-first, data-driven economy.
8 consecutive years of revenue growth.