Scalable, performant, real-time streaming technology.
A unified processing platform that enables batch, streaming, and service-based architectures underlies all of Ab Initio’s technology. This platform provides a high performance, scalable, and distributed foundation for all your digital applications in the cloud or on premises. All applications, regardless of type, are expressed graphically as a data flow graph — a pipeline of processing components connected by flows. Once executed, the data records flow through the graph and are transformed and routed by the components.
This data processing model is inherently streaming-based — all the components are active in memory while at the same time forming a high performance processing pipeline. What changes between the different compute models is the checkpoint-restart model; for streaming applications, each component saves state on a certain frequency (for example, a time interval or the number of records processed).
This means that it is easy to build high-throughput, distributed, streaming applications that are also reliable with exactly-once guarantees. Data can be streamed in and out of the graph in any format and from any source, including change data capture and all common messaging systems. For example, our customers use the Ab Initio platform to stream and process millions of records per second from communication networks, IoT devices, and web clicks.
A rapidly growing major bank needed to implement real-time response for millions of customers. The only problem was how.
Encouraging customers to take advantage of the bank’s multiple product offerings was a great idea at the time — customers could have a variety of accounts.
The fact that these accounts were handled through separate business units was initially a minor detail, necessitated by the available technology. As the bank grew, this minor detail became a major issue. The bank was managing millions of accounts and didn’t know which business units customers were working with. A customer might have accounts in multiple business units or only in one.
Lucrative marketing and cross-selling opportunities were evaporating daily because the bank did not know who had which products. Customers calling about problems might have to deal with multiple people to solve the same problem across business units. The bank was losing increasing volumes of customer interactions, rather than mining them for potentially valuable information.
The bank realized that it was time to take action. The plan was simple:
The bank looked at many technologies, but only one company could meet all their business needs: Ab Initio.
Using Ab Initio’s powerful event processing capabilities, the bank implemented a system that could store and access in near real-time over a billion customer transactions, adding millions of new transactions daily. New customer interactions were available for query almost instantaneously. Customer problems could be dealt with quickly, without making the customer speak to multiple business units. Automatic lead generation enabled the bank to pursue marketing opportunities immediately, rather than days or weeks after the event.
Real-time responses and happy customers, all thanks to Ab Initio!