By chance this week I happened upon a website of a well-known steakhouse – one I have often visited, although not my absolute top pick. On their website I was greeted with a personalized offer to pair my next steak dinner with one of three really good wines, all deeply discounted. A quick exploration of what it entailed only lasted a few minutes before I moved on to something else, but when I opened my email inbox, there was an additional enticement to the same restaurant. Simply from casually browsing of the website I had become a target for even more marketing emails.
For those working with Big Data, this would appear ho-hum. A simple example of correlating where I lived and where I was at the time I went online combined with collected history of previous meals and tailoring something just for me – a fine 22oz bone-in rib eye with a bottle of Silver Oak. Clearly a good setup for a dinner for two, and at a price that I almost gave in to – if it wasn’t so cold outside I may have just taken them up on the offer.
At this time of the year the NonStop community is becoming somewhat jaded from the many user events being held, but fortunately with just a few weeks remaining before the year winds down, there’s only a couple more – DUST in Arizona and InNUG in India. However, there’s been plenty of upsides and last week I posted about joining the WebAction team in presenting to those attending the annual NonStop Technical Boot Camp. What came from this, almost by coincidence, is the recognition from those I talked to – users and vendors alike – that the days of keeping NonStop isolated from major initiatives (whether overtly or by indifference) were coming to an end. There were simply too many good reasons for NonStop solutions to integrate with the rest of the enterprise’s IT deployments, particularly when it comes to data.
NonStop and WebAction Intersect for a Targeted Big Data Niche
In the post of December 3, 2014, Niches open and niches close and yet the versatile NonStop prevails! to the NonStop community blog, Real Time View, I touched on the impact NonStop has in certain niches, or submarkets as they are often called. Pulling from a previously published quote by WebAction Cofounder, Sami Akbay, “When it comes to the bigger picture of computers worldwide – then yes, NonStop is a niche,” I highlighted just how important NonStop had become when it came to serving select submarkets. And here’s where the coincidence becomes better understood – WebAction is targeting a particular sector of the marketplace even as NonStop dominates select niches. When they intersect, they provide a compelling case for just why Big Data is as important as it now is. The pendulum has swung far away from batch and is closing in on the world of real time processing.
If you haven’t read the Bloor Report, The Genesis of the Real-time Enterprise, How WebAction Enables Truly Responsive IT Applications then you are missing some key points about this world of real time processing. “There is obvious merit in companies,” the report states, “ingesting real-time streams of data from multiple sources, processing them as a time series and automatically adjusting their behavior to proactively respond to their environment as it changes.” More to the point, and yet another coincidence, is the example that’s taken from the retail marketplace. With WebAction (and yes, with data from NonStop), “can identify when top customers are on site, adding contextual and historical information to enable the retailer to proactively reward loyalty or instigate a sale.” Yes, I can hear that rib eye sizzling even now as it calls out my name; and yes, of course, it’s a Big Steak!
