![\"donald](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/donald-feinberg-banner-2.jpg?resize=690%2C310&ssl=1\" "\\"donald")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This is the second post based on a SAP-sponsored breakfast meeting organized in Sydney earlier this year, as part of a ANZ\/APJ innovation analytics tour<\/a>, with speaker Donald Feinberg, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst<\/a> explaining the \u201cNexus of Forces<\/a>\u201d: social, mobile, cloud and information.<\/p>\n After covering why in-memory is disrupting everything, and why every organization will be running in-memory in 15 to 20 years time<\/a>,<\/p>\n In this post, Donald explains the business impacts of the new in-memory computing possibilities, and in the next post, how to create an in-memory action plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n These comments are based on my notes taken from the speech, formatted for legibility.<\/p>\n What is the impact of in-memory computing on your business? It\u2019s about running the business, growing the business, and transforming the business, and you need to look at the business impact of this technology across all of these.<\/p>\n One of the biggest advantages of memory that people forget is this: right now, you have lots of applications. And today, people typically have one application per server. Let\u2019s say you have your corporate running on ten servers today, and it\u2019s spread out across locations, because of storage access and the speed of the processors and the speed of the applications and the database access.<\/p>\n If I can consolidate that down to a single server, I\u2018m going to save a lot of money, right off the bat. Not only power, floor space, cooling, but replacement costs every three to four years for ten or twenty servers is more than one. It\u2019s not necessarily a single server — it may be one or two — but it\u2019s going to be much fewer.<\/p>\n The people required to maintain it are going to be fewer, your maintenance costs per year are going to be less, everything is less. So the speed of these in-memory technologies on just running your business \u2013 forget about transforming for a minute \u2013 is going to be a huge savings. Because if one applications runs a hundred times faster on a server, I can get more applications on that server. <\/strong><\/p>\n When I said you you\u2019re going to run your whole business in-memory in 10 or 15 years<\/a>, I left off the fact that it\u2019s going to be on a single server the size of what you think of as a desktop server, plugged into the wall with no special air conditioning needs. That\u2019s the kind of miniaturization and speed that in-memory is bringing to the table, with huge savings.<\/p>\n I know many of you are saying \u201che\u2019s not talking about high availability or disaster recovery\u201d. All of that is coming — and it also is miniaturized. You\u2019re not going to run your business on one of these, you\u2019re going to run your business on two of them, sitting next to each other, duplicating everything it does, synchronously. That\u2019s your high availability. Then you\u2019ll put another one somewhere else, in somebody\u2019s home, 250 or 800 kilometers away, and that\u2019s your disaster recovery center. You hire a disaster recovery manager in Perth, and put the disaster recovery in his house — that\u2019s the way it will be in the future.<\/p>\n The latency with in-memory is so low that you can do things synchronously that you wouldn\u2019t have thought to do synchronously before<\/strong>. It\u2019s not only a matter of how many things you can do, and how much you can fit into this box because of the speed, but it\u2019s also because of what the latency is going to give you.<\/p>\n Why is that important? Think about where information and mobile and social come together, and you need to do messaging and things like that. Because of this lower latency, I can start to do things I couldn\u2019t even consider before, because I couldn\u2019t get it fast enough to even think about it.<\/p>\n How many of you may have applications that you thought about doing, but because things took so long on your system, it\u2019s just not reasonable to do? I\u2019m not talking about the demonstrable ones like if you\u2019re in the manufacturing business, your MRP run takes four to six hours overnight, now you can run it in five seconds. So you can use the application differently.<\/p>\n And other things that you couldn\u2019t do at all now become possible. As we start to do sentiment analysis, looking at social networks, and building it into a planning application that I\u2019m running in seconds, that\u2019s huge in the way you can change your business.<\/p>\n Think about if somebody says to you \u201cI want to buy 10,000 cases\u201d and you don\u2019t even know if you can produce that. And then he says \u201cI want it next week.\u201d<\/p>\n How long does it take your company to commit to that, and to figure out a price, that may in fact be higher because I\u2019m going to bounce other customers off the production line in order to get this done? If you can do that with a latency in seconds, it changes the way you do business.<\/p>\n That now is getting into \u201ctransform the business\u201d because an application that you view as \u201ca forecasting package that I run overnight\u201d is not a just a forecasting package if I can run it in five seconds or two minutes. It becomes a sales tool<\/strong>, changing the way I\u2019m doing business.<\/p>\n The example that I like to use is this: airlines want to sell you discount tickets. Most people don\u2019t know that airlines re-price all the tickets on all their planes every night. So your company goes and buys a full-fare ticket because you need it refundable.<\/p>\n The next day, that flight may have two more discount tickets because they have a yield that they need for each plane, for each flight, so they can actually go through a whole calculation that tells them how many discount tickets they can have. Now, why is this valuable to them? Well, if you get on to, say, Qantas today and say \u201cI want to go to Singapore and I want a discount ticket\u201d and there are none on the day of the flight that you want, most of you wait until tomorrow to see if there are any, right?\u201d Not true \u2013 most people don\u2019t even know that happens. Instead, what you\u2019re going to do is switch over to Singapore Airlines and if they have a ticket, you\u2019re going to buy it and Qantas just lost the revenue.<\/p>\n But if Qantas could re-price every seat on every plane every time a ticket was sold<\/em>, that business wouldn\u2019t go away. If you had an application like that, which in-memory will allow you to do, and you went to the CEO of the airline and said \u201cwe have this application, do you want it?\u201d, how much do you think they would be willing to pay? I\u2019ll tell you — they won\u2019t even ask how much it costs. That\u2019s how much it transforms their business, and changes what they do. They\u2019ll pay whatever you want.<\/p>\n So far, we\u2019ve been talking just about in-memory DBMS. Here are some of the other ways the technology is used.<\/p>\n In-memory data grids <\/strong>have been around a long time. If any of you do web applications, you may be using some them. Memcached<\/a> is the one that comes to mind \u2013 an open-source product \u2013 where your data\u2019s in memory, in the application, and scales across multiple computers, multiple servers. That technology\u2019s been around a long time and enables some of the biggest web applications that you\u2019re all using, including Amazon, including eBay, and all the spinoffs of those.<\/p>\n High-performance messaging infrastructure<\/strong>. Think about what happens if you want to send a message out to four or five thousand of your customers at a time. It\u2019s an SMS message or whatever, in-memory\u2019s going to be able to do that much quicker.<\/p>\n Wouldn\u2019t it be nice if you\u2019re an airline, and you\u2019re cancelling a flight, to get those messages out quickly? Or, in retail, if you\u2019re going to have a special pricing discount, you\u2019re going to send out to all the customers registered on your site, and you\u2019re a big retailer with one hundred thousand or a million customers, think about how high-performance messaging is going to happen.<\/p>\n Complex event processing<\/strong>. That\u2019s what fraud detection is all about, especially for cloned cell phones, for trading fraud, for credit-card fraud, for anything where some analysis is taking place on streaming data coming into a computer and in real-time. I make a decision on an event that\u2019s happening, and then do something about it.<\/p>\n In-memory application servers<\/strong>. These are necessary if you\u2019re going to do this consolidation onto a single or double box of all your applications. Your application servers have to be in-memory, and they can\u2019t be based on disk drives, or they\u2019re not going to run as fast as all the other technology that is enabled with the applications running in the application server.<\/p>\n All of these together make up \u201cin-memory technologies\u201d. The providers of this technology are going to merge together and all of this is going to become an in-memory megadata platform over the next three to five years. Data grids are going to go away and just become part of the in-memory database. These two will be the first to merge, and they\u2019re merging already with in-memory analytic applications and application servers.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the future, as they merge together, which will enable you to run your whole business in memory.<\/p>\n So what drives all this? Well, big data. Now remember \u201cbig data\u201d is not just about volume. When we mention big data with respect to in-memory, people think we\u2019re crazy, because big data is a lot of data, and people say \u201cI\u2019m not going to put a petabyte in memory: it\u2019s too expensive!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBig Data<\/strong>\u201d is volume (big size) and\/or velocity(how fast the data\u2019s coming in) and\/or the variety of data(unstructured data). In-memory can support velocity today, that\u2019s one the first use case of it, high-speed data coming in through event processing, smart metering, etc. And it can support unstructured data. As the price comes down, as compression gets better, it\u2019ll also get start to get larger and larger on volume of data.<\/p>\n Real-time analytics.<\/strong> For years, Gartner has said there is no such thing as \u201creal-time.\u201d Today, you are running analytics on data that is coming from a transaction system. If I have to say it that way, there\u2019s a latency there. Some ETL or data integration process has to move data from the transaction system to the data warehouse before you can do those analytics. The only way you can do real-time analytics is if it\u2019s being done on the transaction data when it\u2019s completed. So that is one of the drivers for this.<\/p>\n 24×7 with no batch windows<\/strong>. If you batch window drops to less than zero, you\u2019re going to have to run things very quickly. Batch is going away. That Materials Requirement Planning batch run that takes six hours? If it starts to run in 3-4 seconds, it\u2019s really no longer batch.<\/p>\n So the whole concept of batch disappears with in-memory technology. Any time you see words like \u201cawareness\u201d then you\u2019re talking about in-memory. In order to make any applications aware of things it means real time, and it means you need the speed and low latency of in-memory technology to do it.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s slowing us down?<\/p>\n A lot of these are perceptions. So the perception that it\u2019s a complex architecture: it doesn\u2019t have to be.<\/p>\n The perception that it\u2019s unrealistic: today, this technology is emerging, and yes, it\u2019s disruptive, but no, you can\u2019t do everything with it. So the expectations have to be set right. There are of course no standards, there aren\u2019t a lot of skills and there\u2019s not a lot of best practices yet, because this is just emerging with those. That will happen over the next few years.<\/p>\n So yes, there are many drivers, but at the same time there are many inhibitors, a lot of which you can change by setting expectations and perceptions correctly. So you start to think about IT looking at all this data and saying \u201cwhat do I do with it all?\u201d and the bottom line is: if your assumptions are that you can\u2019t do anything with it, you\u2019re not going to do anything with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n See the first post, on why in-memory changes everything<\/a>, or next post in the series: Part 3,\u00a0how to create an in-memory action plan<\/a>. In addition, if\u00a0you’re interested in hearing Donald Feinberg talk about this, a\u00a0web seminar is available<\/a>\u00a0(registration required)]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A second post covering Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Donald Feinberg’s presentation on the impact of in-memory computing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-practice","category-presentations"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/donald-feinberg-banner-2-1.jpg?fit=690%2C310&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3cy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBusiness impact of in-memory computing<\/h3>\n
![\"business-impact-of-in-memory\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/business-impact-of-in-memory_thumb.jpg?resize=540%2C389&ssl=1\" "\\"business-impact-of-in-memory\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nRun the business<\/h3>\n
Transform the business<\/h3>\n
In-memory computing technologies<\/h3>\n
![\"taxonomy-of-in-memory\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/taxonomy-of-in-memory_thumb.jpg?resize=521%2C399&ssl=1\" "\\"taxonomy-of-in-memory\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nDrivers of in-memory computing<\/h3>\n
![\"drivers-of-in-memory\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/drivers-of-in-memory_thumb.jpg?resize=550%2C419&ssl=1\" "\\"drivers-of-in-memory\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nInhibitors of in-memory computing adoption<\/h3>\n