The proliferation of data during and after the Global Pandemic, the advent of 5G, and the rise of IOT have created an insatiable demand for fast, accurate digital transactions. Further, these transactions must be computed in real-time in sub-milliseconds and often at a petabyte scale.
The speed and ease with which a company can deliver instant, accurate information and intelligent actions directly affects consumer satisfaction and business outcomes. With the click of a mouse, a tap on a screen, or a request for Alexa, we expect an action to occur immediately and precisely. We all get annoyed watching loading circles on Netflix or standing in line to deposit or withdraw funds, and if you don’t get an instant ride-share response, you are off to one of the competitors. Today, we live, work, and compete in The Right-Now Economy.
Clocking The ‘Right-Now’ into the Economy
The new “right now” customer experience is measured in a window of 50-300 milliseconds. To put this in context, the speed of the blink of a human eye is 100 to 400 milliseconds, or between a 10th and half of a second, and each rapid decision needs to be right. Fast and wrong is even worse than slow and right for customers who don’t care about your infrastructure hurdles. The age of “human speed and scale” has been replaced by the age of “machine speed and machine scale”. Inputs need to be processed as and when they come in, making it in real time. According to LinkedIn’s ‘APAC State of the Sales 2022’, 73% of businesses in India use sales technology at least once a week, and 23% cite real-time data accuracy as the primary benefit of using technology to optimize sales. So, it is important for businesses to produce accurate results in the shortest time possible on an unlimited scale.
Data Must be Delivered in Real-Time
Data is a key factor driving this economy—from everyday actions to critical business events like fraud detection, money transfers, and smart manufacturing. Every one of those actions, those decisions, are data driven. Instantly and accurately computing multiple requests makes up real time data processing. This “right now” decisioning uses a lot of data and requires “right now”—real-time processing of massive volumes of constantly-changing data at a huge scale.
When you break down a transaction and look at the process of placing an order on a mobile application, you can better understand the role of “real-time” in data analytics. A customer is now able to search for and purchase a desired product, and the information is available to them in seconds. If the customer chooses to buy the product, online payment can be securely completed in milliseconds. Real-time updates are then provided to the customer until the product reaches the desired location. The customers’ search, payments, and delivery details all fall under the real-time data bracket.
The banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industries highlight the demands of the Right Now Economy for real-time data computing on a huge scale. To deposit or withdraw cash, one has to visit the closest bank and complete the necessary paperwork. Today, these transactions occur instantly and securely regardless of geography or the size of the transaction. The entire process is a seamless online banking experience. According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), there were 5.58 billion UPI transactions in April 2022. Since these transactions are taking place in real time, the inputs and outputs must be precise as well. Real time data processing makes it possible to not only complete these actions in a timely manner but also process massive amounts of data all at once while providing a more synchronous result.
Winning In the Right Now Economy
Every modern business generates data, which can be a small piece of information or a larger set of files. In 2021, an incredible 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created every day. 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years. Experts project that the volume of data will double every two years. So, it’s not a coincidence that the best companies and category leaders in key markets are processing large volumes of data from multiple sources for real-time decisioning to power right-now economics.
Organizations that leverage a real-time data platform with predictable sub-millisecond performance with low latency at gigabyte-to-petabyte scale and at an affordable cost will win in the “Right-Now Economy”.
(The author is Mr. Aveekshith Bushan, Vice President – Asia Pacific & Japan at Aerospike and the views expressed in this article are his own)