On the big data side, companies have a need for speed. Whether it’s proactively preventing fraud or predictive maintenance, GigaSpaces Technologies Ltd. aims to be the one to call for those big data solutions, thanks to its work in artificial intelligence to push real-time insights. As winners of this year’s Innovation Award at Informatica World in Las Vegas, GigaSpaces proves that it’s positioned to solve problems for enterprises who compute on the edge.

“Instead of interacting with the data once a day, once an hour, you want to be able to drive analytics in the moment, as soon as it happens, to provide the ability to run your online processes instead of offline process,” said Yoav Einav (pictured, right), vice president of products at GigaSpaces, on its proactive solution to driving analytics.

Einav and Rik Tamm-Daniels (pictured, left), vice president of strategic ecosystems and technology at Informatica LLC., spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the  Informatica World event in Las Vegas. They discussed Informatica’s Innovation Award and how enterprises benefit from quickly interacting with data in the moment (see the full interview with transcript here). (*Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: Rik, talk a little bit about this award and the genesis of it. Where did the idea come from?

Tamm-Daniels: One of the things we really wanted to do at Informatica World this year is address some of the most important topics that the customers want to hear about cloud and AI, two of the hottest topics of the industry. What we wanted to do is take a lot of our emerging partners that are doing some very innovative things with Informatica technology and put them front and center.

If you look at the expo hall floor, it’s right in the middle. We have almost like an art gallery of all this cool innovation going on around the Informatica technology. The idea was that we had attendees come in and actually review the solutions. They had to be full working demos, and they could vote on the app. The end result is, I’m happy to announce, GigaSpaces is our big winner.

Knight: So GigaSpaces, tell us about it.

Einav: Our R&D is based in Israel, and our HQ is in New York. We’ve been in the market for more than a decade, deployed in the largest enterprises in the world, like Bank of America, United Electric, the largest airline, and largest railway company. Basically, we provide the speed for their application and big-data infrastructure. So they deploy real-time cases like fraud detection, dynamic pricing, predictive maintenance, all those different types of services that require the speed on the big data side.

Knight: How are you using Informatica?

Einav: We’ve been working lately with Informatica very tightly with both their product team and their research and development team across Israel, India and the U.S. on integrating with some of their different products. Basically, we’ve built what Gartner calls the digital integration hub. It’s like the next-gen big-data architecture, which provides you both the Informatica side that allows you to ingest any type of data — it could be text, logs, transaction, payments, anything you have — together with metadata management. And on top of it, using GigiSpaces for the real-time analytics and the high-performance speed.

Knight: Rik, I know that [the Innovation award] was attendee chosen, so there’s no rigging here, but I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on GigaSpaces in terms of the innovations that they’re doing in these very important problems like fraud detection and predictive maintenance. These are big problems companies are wrestling with.

Tamm-Daniels: I think what’s exciting about the solution they had is it was a great business case. I think that really resonated with attendees. Everyone can identify with fraud analytics. Everyone’s, unfortunately, probably been a victim of it, so they get to see how it works. But I think it also focuses on the aspect of AI — how do you operationalize AI?

So it’s the whole model-building piece of it, and Informatica is a strong player there as well. But now you say, “We have the model; we need to execute quickly. How do we do that with the GigaSpaces technology but also combine it with the right historical context to make the right decisions.” So it really does hit on, “How do you actually take AI and make it a real thing?”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Informatica World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World 2019. Neither Informatica LLC, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE