The streaming data pie is growing, and Hazelcast wants a piece of it. It’s got some way to go, funding helps, but is it enough?

Object caching. In a way, that’s where it all began for Hazelcast. Back in the day, Ehcache was one of the first solutions to popularize the use of caching in Java. Ehcache was founded by Greg Luck, who later went on to serve as CEO and CTO for Hazelcast.

Conceptually, caches and in-memory data grids are very close anyway: it’s all about using fast memory to speed up access to data residing in slow(er) storage systems. Doing caching efficiently is a hard problem, and Luck is among the leading experts in the field. About a year ago, however, Luck stepped down from his role as Hazelcast CEO and took over the CTO role, while Kelly Herrell became CEO.

This move was part of a bigger plan for Hazelcast. Today, Hazelcast announced it has closed a $21.5 million funding round, by both new and existing investors, and ZDNet discussed the plan with Herrell.

Herrell has helped build four successful Silicon Valley companies over the past 20 years. He said that what attracted him to his new role was the size and dynamics of Hazelcast’s global community and customers, even though he was not familiar with in-memory platforms up to that point.

Hazelcast quotes Gartner, according to which “Digital business model imperatives are demanding cost-effective support for real-time analytics, hyperscale architectures and fast access to data demanded by digital business models, which in turn drives fast growth for most in-memory computing (IMC)-enabling technologies and IMC-enabled architectures.”

As far as we’re concerned, that’s preaching to the choir — we’ve long ago identified in-memory processing as a key ingredient of modern data platforms for building real-time applications. In fact, some of today’s most successful platforms do that already. So the real questions are, what does Hazelcast bring to the table compared to those, and how will the funding make a difference.

Read the full article on ZDNet