In-Memory Computing for SaaS Applications

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This article is the second in an editorial series with a goal to provide direction for SaaS company thought leaders on ways to achieve higher levels of scalability and performance through use of in-memory computing technology.

In last week’s article, we explored the benefits that SaaS firms can achieve by adopting in-memory computing technologies.

insideBIGDATA_Guide_HyperscaleIn-Memory Computing for SaaS Applications

IMC is a clear winning technology for SaaS companies, and it’s important to fully understand the nuances of the technology. For a deeper examination of IMC technology, please download the “insideBIGDATA Guide to In-Memory Computing” sponsored by GridGain. The guide includes: Introduction to IMC, The Business Case for IMC, Types of IMC, and Performance Benchmark.

One leading-edge industry using IMC to achieve top performance and scale is financial services where companies operate in a constant state of flux and where immediacy is critical. Historically, the financial services industry has some of the highest computing demands compared to other sectors due to the importance of low latency exchanges. In a very real and direct sense, speed translates to profit and latency translates to loss. As a result, the industry has been one of the earliest adopters of IMC technology, which offers data processing that is orders of magnitude faster and more scalable than traditional methods. Unlike disk-based processing, in which data is stored predominantly on disk and data is taken to the computation—a time-consuming, resource-intensive process—IMC stores the data mostly in the RAM of a cluster of computers and brings the computation to your data, yielding superior performance on commodity hardware.

Here is a small sample of how financial services firms currently use IMC:

  • Real-time trade reporting – IMC provides the power necessary to remain competitive in trading, and any endeavor that relates to it, including support, modeling, testing, backtesting and re-pricing.
  • Post-trading processing for 24/7 global trading – As trading has become almost universally global, financial services firms now must close their books daily. In order to achieve same-day reconciliation and straightthrough processing (STP), companies rely on IMC technology to deliver the post-processing performance required. IMC is called upon to manage the extremely large amount of data at the required speed, enabling financial services firms to engage in 24/7 global trading.
  • Risk analysis – In large part, financial services involve an exercise in risk management. Practically everything that a financial services company does, somehow directly relates to risk, as companies constantly must assess their exposure based on current strategies. The questions that must be asked are unfathomably complicated, and answering them in an actionable timeline and with accuracy requires the advanced computing capabilities that only IMC technology provides.
  • Fraud detection – Financial institutions have been using in-memory computing for fraud detection for quite some time. The real-time processing demands for fraud detection mean that delays of seconds, even milliseconds, can’t be tolerated. Acceptable performance requires real-time data access for ultra-fast processing, superior reactive response and proactive planning. Only IMC can provide that level of performance.

For firms trying to meet the extreme demands of financial services computing, the question is not whether to leverage IMC technologies, but rather how to best leverage it. It is a good idea for SaaS companies to strive for those same advantages.

IMC appeals to SaaS companies due to the amount of performance and scale it can deliver. Furthermore, IMC fits well into a multi-tenant, cloud, SaaS environment. With the hybrid SaaS model, vendors offer both a hosted SaaS version of their application and an on-premise version. An IMC solution like the GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric can be deployed for either version and the deployment looks the same. For a SaaS company having customers who want their own data segregated and capacity dedicated to them, an IMC solution like GridGain’s offers a broad pallet of capabilities that form a robust platform for SaaS companies.

If you prefer, the complete insideBIGDATA Guide to Hyperscaling Your SaaS Infrastructure is available for download in PDF from the insideBIGDATA White Paper Library, courtesy of GridGain.

 

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