The average time spent online in 2021 was three hours a day. That’s almost a collective 24 billion hours per day across the world. A lot of that time is spent on data-intensive applications (think Amazon, Instagram or Uber Eats) where users demand real-time response and hyper-personalization.

Analyzing that data and generating relevant insights from it is the key to competing in the digital market. But while cloud data lakes and warehouses have made batch analytics accessible, systems that return reports in minutes or hours can’t deliver the real-time responsiveness that today’s consumers demand. This doesn’t matter to tech giants, which can afford to build complex customized systems to analyze incoming data. But it makes competing tough for smaller and newly digital companies.

“The gap in the market is that all warehouses and lakes are built for batch,” said Venkat Venkataramani (pictured, left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Rockset Inc. “They’re really good at letting people accumulate huge volumes of data and once a week an analyst asking a question, generating a report, and everybody looking at it. [But] with real time, the data never stops coming; the queries never stop coming.”

Venkataramani and Dhruba Borthakur (pictured, right), co-founder and chief technology officer of Rockset, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in advance of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. They discussed the importance of real-time streaming analytics in today’s business world and how Rockset’s SQL-based rollups make access to real-time streaming analytics easy and affordable for any size business. (* Disclosure below.)

Real-time analytics are essential to differentiate from the competition

As the world spends more and more time online, real-time analytics have become an essential part of the modern data stack, enabling companies to provide customers and employees with on-demand content, personalized recommendations, and instant alerts when a potential problem arises.

“Everybody wants fast queries on fresh data,” stated Venkataramani, citing the instant success of the Confluent Inc. IPO as proof that streaming data has hit the mainstream.

The levels of observability pioneered by DevOps teams are now demanded across the business, according to Venkataramani, with executives demanding up-to-the-minute answers on operations efficiency, sales tracking and customer engagement. Without that visibility, the company loses the opportunity to act on potentially important insights, he added.

This need for real-time analysis applies to both business-to-consumer and business-to-business models as employees and customers demand the same levels of responsiveness across the board.

“I don’t want to use a product if it doesn’t have real-time analytics baked in,” Venkataramani said. “It’s really a huge differentiator whether you’re building a software product or you’re running a business.”

Today, most data is stored in massive data lakes or warehouses in the cloud and processed using batch analytics on a nightly basis. Accessing this data in real-time is possible, but “it gets very expensive and very complex very quickly,” Venkataramani stated.

Batch gives way to affordable real-time streaming analysis

Cloud native Rockset is filling the market demand for real-time analytics by indexing “humongous amounts of data cheaply, efficiently and economically feasibly,” Borthakur said.

Rockset’s database enables users to connect real-time data sources — whether data streams such as Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis; online transaction processing databases like Amazon DynamoDB, MongoDB, MySQL and PostgresSQL; or data lakes, such as Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage — using real-time connectors.

SQL-based rollups, an upgrade to Rockset released in August this year, gave the company an industry edge by using SQL to continuously transform and summarize time-series streaming data from any data source during ingestion.

“You can define any real-time metric that you want to track across any dimensions you care about … and Rockset will automatically maintain all those real-time metrics for you in a highly accurate fashion,” Venkataramani stated. Benefits include 125x faster queries, 20x faster time to market and 15x fewer ops hours, which results in 100x more cost-effective real-time streaming analysis, according to Rockset.

This reduces the barrier for entry to real-time analysis, Venkataramani told theCUBE. Instead of “duct-taping together multiple, disparate components and systems that were never meant to work with each other, now you have a real-time database built for the cloud that supports full feature SQL,” he said.

Every app is now a data application

If software ate the world, data is now eating software as static applications become interactive, predictive and responsive. These applications are funneling data back toward the business, providing a constant stream of information to be analyzed.

“The whole movement towards data-intensive applications is a huge use case for us,” Venkataramani said. “Most of our customers, I would say, are building a data application in one shape or form or another.”

Construction industry software specialist Command Alkon Inc. relies on Rockset to monitor real-time location data for concrete delivery trucks.

“Eighty percent of concrete in North America flows through their platform. And what they want to know … is how many concrete trucks are arriving at a big construction site, which ones are late,” Venkataramani said.

Another customer within the finance industry provided a test-case scenario when they experienced latency issues in a dashboard built on top of Snowflake Inc.’s Data Cloud. The delay was significant enough that employees weren’t using the internal dashboards. So they asked Rockset to help. Three weeks later, queries that had been taking two to five seconds were returning in 18 milliseconds, according to Venkataramani.

“Speed is really, really important. Scale is really, really important. Data freshness is important. If you combine all of these things and also make it simple for people to access SQL-based, that’s really the real unique value prop that we have at Rockset, which is what our customers love,” he stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event on September 22. (* Disclosure: Rockset Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Rockset nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE